Biography
Analytical Expertise Applied to Health Care – An engineer by training – having obtained a BSc in Structural Engineering in Romania, followed by a PhD in Computational Mechanics from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal – I have solid computational and analytical skills, which in the last 14 years, I applied in the health care field. This technical expertise combined with an MBA from the University of British Columbia, enabled me to be active in multiple roles in change management, strategic and operational planning, applied health informatics, research and evaluation in community-based primary care, mental health, substance use and home health services at VCH. I manage large initiatives in a multi-disciplinary and complex environment, such as system redesign initiatives, policy development, standardization and evaluation of outcome metrics.
Vancouver Community Analytics Tool (VCAT) – I have co-created and continue to co-develop VCAT (with Dr. Ron Joe), which is a novel software tool that aggregates data from various health care sites in Vancouver, such as community health centres, detox centres and the emergency department, for example, to create a virtual patient record, documenting all patient health outcomes and interactions with the health care system. The VCAT Complexity Module provides accurate and real-time measures of bio-psychosocial complexity at client and population levels, integrating multiple data sources. The patient complexity score has been used at VCH in primary care, mental health and substance use empanelment for patient-centered allocation decisions of services. VCAT dashboards to facilitate data visualization and feedback for staff have been created for primary care, Intensive Case Management, the Boost Collaborative (a quality improvement project for Opioid Agonist Therapy) and for tracking health outcomes in the impoverished inner-city Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver. VCAT is also being used to manage the HIV, HCV, COPD and Diabetes Cascades of Care and to inform the Community Health Centre Core Services Initiative, which is the focus of the proposed project. VCAT has become socialized, highly regarded and widely used at VCH and is beginning to be utilized in other settings (for example, St. Michael’s Hospital Toronto, John Hopkins University).
