Temerty Centre Speaker Series: Derek Beaton (Jan. 31)
DATE: January 31, 2025 (Fri.) TIME: 12pm to 1pm ET METHOD: Zoom NOTE: This event is CPD-accredited for physicians PRESENTER: Derek Beaton (Director, Advanced Analytics St.Michael's Hospital, Unity Health Toronto)
Building and rebuilding environments for applied AI in healthcare at Unity Health Toronto
Description
The Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA) team is an applied data science team at Unity Health Toronto. Over the past 7+ years we’ve deployed more than 50 data science tools into practice across our hospitals. These range from staffing solutions (like assignment or scheduling) to operational (like ED department wait times or volume forecasting) through to clinical tools (like CHARTWatch, a deterioration prediction tool, and a suite of real time medical imaging tools).
This talk is broken into three parts:
• Part 1 covers who we are as a team, how we’re structured, and a focus on some of our deployments.
• Part 2 goes into more details about some of our tools, the way we’ve approached deployments, the environment(s) we use, and some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way.
• Part 3 will be a (very) fresh reflection on how a team like ours handles massive digital transformation. At the time of the presentation, we will be 2 months post-go-live with a new electronic patient record system. I’ll discuss what we’ve done in preparation (for more than a year), how we’re managing the redeployment of our tools to bring them back online, and what our immediate and longer-term future holds
Learning Objectives
High levels of:
(1) familiarity with some tools, approaches, and environments for applied AI in healthcare,
(2) understanding of some of the issues organizations may face when deploying (and redeploying) AI into practice, and
(3) understanding some strategies for deploying, evaluating, and monitoring of many AI tools into practice.
About the Speaker
Derek leads the Advanced Analytics team in Data Science & Advanced Analytics (DSAA) at Unity Health Toronto. The Advanced Analytics team is comprised of data scientists with exceptional breadth and depth in statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (e.g., evaluation, forecasting, predictive modelling, imaging, workforce analytics). Derek and his team are responsible for developing statistical and machine-learning models that are integrated into clinical and operational workflows at Unity Health Toronto. The advanced analytics team also evaluates and monitors the performance and impact of the tools that DSAA creates.
Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences and one of the Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative's scholars; his work focused on multivariate methods, multi-modal data, biostatistics, and neuroinformatics. Derek has a MS and PhD in Cognition and Neuroscience from The University of Texas at Dallas, where his work was primarily on statistical analyses of big data (e.g., genomics, neuroimaging). He also has a MS and BS in Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Derek is the author of multiple widely used R packages (the ExPosition family of packages), has authored or coauthored over 60 journal publications, and is currently the joint world records holder for the fastest 5-person costumed half marathon and fastest 5-person costumed marathon.
