Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Assistant Professor at SIM and Director of the Social Media Lab, has been awarded a MITACS Accelerate Grant in the amount of $15,000.  Mitacs-Accelerate is Canada’s premiere research internship program. It connects Canadian companies to top notch students and researchers at research-based universities. Students and researchers selected for this program will apply skills and theory to real-world problems and find solution to business research challenges. This initiative is in partnership with the Capital District Health Authority (CDHA) of Nova Scotia and Dr. Calvino Cheng Incorporated, a health informatics company founded by Dr. Calvino Cheng from the Department of Pathology at Dalhousie Faculty of Medicine.

The project, “From Data to Knowledge: Developing Effective Visualizations for Finding Inefficiency in Healthcare” consists of a multidisciplinary team led by Dr. Gruzd and includes Conrad Ng (MLIS 2011) and Dr. Calvino Cheng. This project will allow Conrad Ng, the student co-applicant on this grant to receive hands-on experience with the latest technologies in the areas of databases, data mining, social network analysis and visualization as well as learn how to apply theory to solve real-life problems. Currently, the CDHA model demonstrates that approximately 60% of laboratory ordering originates in the outpatient setting and is costing the province approximately $3.3 million per month (CDHA quality assurance data). Given the current budgetary constraints of CDHA, the desire to examine health resource utilization more carefully and the need for improved benchmarking and normalizing of laboratory utilization data is gaining more urgency. Unfortunately, due to the large amount of lab data being generated daily, it is currently not possible to conduct any meaningful analysis of laboratory ordering data. The goal of this pilot project is to turn the vast amount of raw data in the CDHA’s laboratory information system into usable information and to give the CDHA new tools to identify any potential inefficiency in the system and to make more effective and meaningful healthcare spending decisions. For more information, visit SocialMediaLab.ca or contact Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd at gruzd@dal.ca.