ON Healthcare

Title: Why Not Advance Health Informatics Education Through Our Colleges?
Guest Speakers: Dr. Stefan V. Pantazi and Dr. Yuri Kagolovsky, Conestoga College
Date: Wed. Nov. 28, 2007
Time: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Physical Location: Davis Centre Room 1302, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario

There is no charge for this event.

However, please register to attend in person, view the live web cast or broadcast to OTN sites at: http://infranet.uwaterloo.ca

Abstract

There is a high demand for health informatics professionals in Canada, representing 2,000 to 9,000 job opportunities in the industry today. Unfortunately, existing Canadian programs produce fewer than 100 graduates annually, only half entering the industry. As the result, health informatics positions are usually filled by individuals with no or minimal formal education in health informatics. To satisfy the needs of the health system and industry, professionals in health informatics must combine an understanding of theory with the ability to apply it in practice. The focus on applied learning has always been a distinguishing feature of community college-based education. In 2004, Conestoga College was accredited by the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities to offer a 4-year Bachelor of Applied Health Sciences degree in health informatics. The program is in its third year. It combines theoretical rigor with application and includes a co-op program. The program curriculum is regularly reviewed by a Program Advisory Committee that includes representatives from industry and academia, as well as co-op employers. This presentation provides an overview of the program, its curriculum, its initial successes and challenges.

Speakers

Dr. Yuri Kagolovsky is a physician from the former Soviet Union with specializations in pediatrics and pathology. He graduated from the University of Victoria with a MSc in health informatics. Yuri participated in the work of HEALNet (Health Evidence Application and Linkage Network), and his research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at national and international conferences. He has been a professor and program coordinator at Conestoga College since 2004. Dr.

Stefan Pantazi is a physician trained in General Medicine in Romania. He received his PhD from the University of Victoria. In his doctoral dissertation “A Deterministic Dynamic Associative Memory (DDAM) Model for Concept Space Representation,” he explored topics in knowledge discovery and representation and underlined the importance of “context-dependent processing of medical information,” a view fundamentally linked to Case Based Reasoning, Information Retrieval and Algorithmic Information Theory.

HOSTED BY: Waterloo Institute for Health Informatics Research at the University of Waterloo

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