Alejandro R. Jadad Bechara - Life in Canada

Life in Canada

While at Oxford, in the early 1990s, Dr. Jadad met Dr. Murray Enkin who had recently co-authored his opus Effective Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth (regarded as one of the 100 most influential books in health services and policy of all times) with Drs. Iain Chalmers and Marc Keirse. Dr. Enkin persuaded Dr. Jadad to continue his research at McMaster University, in Canada, where he stayed from 1995 until 1999. During this period, he was Chief of the Health Information Research Unit; Co-Director of the Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre; Associate Medical Director of the Program in Evidence-based Care of Cancer Care Ontario; Founding Director of the McMaster Evidence-based Practice Centre (the first of its kind funded by the US government in a foreign country); and Professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics.

In 2000, Dr. Jadad moved to Toronto, as the Rose Family Chair in Supportive Care (held until 2010); Director of the Program in eHealth Innovation and Professor in the Departments of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (now an Institute); and Anesthesia. During the following 5 years, he led the creation of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, a simulator of the future of the health system, to study and optimize the use of ICTs before their introduction into the health system. The construction of the Centre was supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the University Health Network, where it is located. During the same time, he led the development of virtual clinical tools to transform the encounter between patients and health professionals, and new ways to use ICTs to respond to major public health threats (e.g., obesity, complex chronic diseases, pandemics) and to enable the public (particularly young people) to shape the health system and society.

In 2002, Dr. Jadad was named the Canada Research Chair in eHealth Innovation (Tier 1). In 2008, he initiated the People, Health equity and Innovation (PHI) Group, in Toronto, to explore ways to level the playing field for disadvantaged groups in society through the innovative use of information and communication technologies.