November 22, 2021

AI for Healthcare at CHIEF Executive Forum Fall Symposium

Report by Tiffany Oei, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

November 22, 2021 – Members of the Chief Executive Forum gathered online for the 2021 Fall Symposium on November 18 and 19 to connect, learn, and discuss the future of healthcare in Canada. CHIEF Executive Forum is where senior professionals and leaders in digital health and healthcare collaborate, exchange best practices, address professional development needs, and offer their expertise in setting the agenda for the effective use of information and technology to improve health and healthcare in Canada. The Spring and Fall Symposia are key dates on the CHIEF Executive Forum calendar.

The afternoon of November 18 was dedicated to rapid-fire presentations from select member organizations on the topic of AI in Health and included the following:

  1. It Takes Two to Tango: Open-Source AI Model for COVID-19 CT Diagnostics and Prognosis presented by Dr. William Parker, Radiologist, with an introduction by Elizabeth Keller, AWS. This project addressed the challenge of accurately diagnosing COVID-19 on CT scan, which required calculating opacity in the lungs to quantify severity of disease – a ‘perfect’ problem for AI in that it was essentially a repetitive task that could be automated. Lessons learned: start small and work bigger.
  2. CANtWAIT: Automated Triaging of MRI Referrals presented by Kyle Eckhard, Vancouver Coastal Health. This ‘waitlist smoothing’ initiative used AI to reduce wait times and avoid duplicate referrals.
  3. Predicting Hospital Length of Stay (LOS) at Admission presented by Aaron Fattori, Deloitte Canada and Sam Tisi, Deloitte Canada. This team built a prediction model using eight years of data with the goal of helping hospitals improve staff planning by identifying characteristics that are highly correlated with patient stay time. Predicting LOS enabled volume surge and staffing needs predictions, which proves especially useful in volatile EMRs.
  4. Use of Virtual Assistant and Automation to Enable Greater Capacity and Access during the Pandemic presented by Jimmy Yang, Accenture and Karen Hay, Ontario Ministry of Health. Development of a chat bot supported via text message to reach and connect potential COVID cases to a local Public Health Unit.
  5. AI for Medical Coding at a Pediatric Inpatient Hospital presented by Nicola Sahar, Semantic Health; Dr. Karim Jessa, SickKids and Sandro Serino, SickKids. The goal of this project is to increase accuracy and efficiency of medical coding and enable coding in real-time while patients are still in the hospital.

Learn more about the CHIEF Executive Forum here.