Dalla Lana School of Public Health

The Biostatistics Seminar Series presents:

“Precision Public Health in Canada: Hurdles and Opportunities” by Dr. Zahra Shakeri, University of Toronto

Abstract: Data suggests that 1 in 4 deaths of Canadians younger than 75 are potentially preventable by reducing the prevalence of known risk factors (e.g., poor lifestyle, smoking) and improving the effectiveness of health care and disease prevention policies. Data from diverse populations will provide a more granular and robust prediction of these risk factors and ensure an unbiased assessment. Canada’s rich provincial, territorial, and national health and social, and environmental data provides a unique opportunity to leverage and integrate these disparate data sources to link public health data more efficiently with clinical data, jump-starting the operationalization of precision public health to provide tailored health care to patients and accelerate early detection of population health issues. In this talk, I will focus on the requirements and challenges of developing an intelligent and robust framework to bridge the gaps between EHRs and public health information needs and discuss the implementation of these requirements by providing examples of digital public health surveillance and EHR data analysis using natural language processing, machine learning, and data visualization techniques.

For Dr. Shakeri’s biosketch, please see https://hivelab-uoft.ca/team/zshakeri &

All are welcome!