Speaker Profiles
Day 1 — May 27, 2021
9:30 AM PST // 12:30 AM EST
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OPENING KEYNOTE
Dr. Kedar Mate
President and Chief Executive Officer, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Kedar Mate, MD, is the President and Chief Executive Officer at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), President of the Lucian Leape Institute, and a member of the faculty at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Dr. Mate’s scholarly work has focused on health system design, health care quality, strategies for achieving large-scale change, and approaches to improving value. Previously Dr. Mate worked at Partners In Health, the World Health Organization, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and served as IHI’s Chief Innovation and Education Officer.
Dr. Mate has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and white papers and has received multiple honors including serving as a Soros Fellow, Fulbright Specialist, Zetema Panelist, and an Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellow. He graduated from Brown University with a degree in American History and from Harvard Medical School with a medical degree. You can follow him on twitter at @KedarMate
Day 2 — May 28, 2021
12:00 PM PST // 3:00 PM EST
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CLOSING KEYNOTE
Dr. Danielle Martin
MD, CCFP, FCFP, MPP Executive Vice-President and Chief Medical Executive, Women’s College Hospital
Danielle Martin is the Executive Vice-President and Chief Medical Executive of Women’s College Hospital (WCH), where she is also a practicing family physician. Danielle is leading the hospital's strategy to establish Women's Virtual, Canada's first virtual hospital, aimed at improving care and reducing health system costs in ways that can be scaled up across our health care system.
Danielle’s policy, clinical and academic expertise, combined with her commitment to health equity, have made her a highly regarded health system leader. She regularly provides expertise and formal advice to lawmakers both nationally and abroad.
Danielle holds a Masters of Public Policy from the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. She is an active scholar and an internationally recognized researcher on health system issues.
As a well-recognized media spokesperson, Danielle frequently provides commentary on health issues through her work as a health contributor at the CBC. Her national bestselling book ‘Better Now: 6 Big Ideas to Improve the Health of all Canadians’, was released in 2017.
In conjunction with her work at WCH, Danielle is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. The recipient of many awards and accolades, in 2019 she became the youngest physician ever to receive the F.N.G Starr Award, the highest honour available to Canadian Medical Association members
Dr. Jason Sutherland
Dr. Jason M. Sutherland is a Professor in the Center for Health Services and Policy Research (CHSPR) in the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Faculty of Medicine and the Program Head of Health Services and Outcomes at the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences.
Dr. Sutherland is currently a funded Scholar of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in British Columbia, has been Canada’s Harkness Fellow in Clinical Practice and Health Policy and has recently completed a role as Ontario’s Provincial Lead of the Value for Money program at Cancer Care Ontario (now Ontario Health). He is the editor-in-chief of Healthcare Policy and an associate editor of Health Policy.
Dr. Sutherland has been studying funding policy, methods for improving cross-continuum care, and health systems’ variations in efficiency, effectiveness and quality of care. He has been leading research evaluating health system funding policy, patients’ outcomes from surgery, and has advised governments on healthcare funding policy in four Canadian provinces.
Carolyn Canfield
Carolyn Canfield is a citizen-patient devoted to expanding opportunities for patients, caregivers and communities to partner with healthcare professionals in research, teaching, improvement and governance. Following her husband's needless death in 2008, Carolyn committed to tackle system learning as a collaboration with patients.
Named Canada’s first Patient Safety Champion in 2014 and appointed as faculty to UBC's Department of Family Practice, Carolyn contributes to the Innovation Support Unit, teaches medical and nursing classes, advocates on UBC Health Council and serves on the Admissions Sub-committee in the Faculty of Medicine. Research roles includes project member, grant adjudicator, journal reviewer and advisor in many settings locally and internationally. Carolyn co-founded the national Patient Advisors Network to develop capacity and leadership among citizen-patients across Canada.
Dr. Cheryl Holmes
Dr. Cheryl Holmes, Associate Dean for the MD Undergraduate Program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) is Clinical Professor and Head of the UBC Department of Medicine’s Division of Critical Care.
She obtained her MD from UBC in 1984. After ten years of family practice, she enrolled in Internal Medicine at UBC and went on to complete a Critical Care fellowship and has been a Fellow of the RCPSC since 1999. From 2001 to July 2018, Dr. Holmes practiced critical care medicine at Kelowna General Hospital (KGH) where she was involved in clinical education of medical students, residents, and fellows in the ICU. She served as Medical Director of Critical Care from 2006 to 2014 and collaborated with Critical Care Division and the Intensive Care Unit Advisory Committee implementing several strategic initiatives, including creating a culture of safety and quality improvement. In her current role as Associate Dean Undergraduate Medical Education, she works with senior leadership at all sites of UBC to provide overall curricular oversight of the UGME program. As Head of the Division of Critical Care, she is responsible for academic leadership of clinical care, education and research in critical care in the province of BC.
Dr. Holmes completed a Master of Health Professions Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, earning Best Thesis for her work entitled Harnessing the Hidden Curriculum; a Four Step Competency Approach”. In 2015 she received the Canadian Association for Medical Education (CAME) Certificate of Merit Award. Dr. Holmes’s research interests are in the Student Voice and the Hidden Curriculum; the Patient Voice in the Learning environment, Equity and Diversity in Medical Education and Leadership; Humanities Education and Indigenization of the Medical Curriculum.
Dr. Mark Gaspar
Dr. Mark Gaspar is a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Social and Behavioural Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto.
Gaspar’s scholarship draws on critical social theory and qualitative research methods to examine the intersections of health, sexuality, and social inequality, bridging sociological inquiry with public health practice. His work traverses three domains: anxiety, uncertainty, and the everyday management of infectious disease risk; the limits of biomedical research at addressing the fundamental causes of health inequities; and the social drivers of health disparities affecting sexual and gender minorities such as those related to HIV, HPV-associated cancers, mental health, substance use, and sexual violence. Gaspar’s research has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, Social Theory & Health, Culture, Health & Sexuality, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Health, Risk & Society.
Dr. Nicholas Christian
Nick Christian is currently a chief resident in internal medicine at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. He is pursuing fellowship training at Yale Program in Addiction Medicine starting in 2021. He is originally from Dayton, Ohio, where he witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of the opioid public health crisis. He received his doctorate of medicine from Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine in Dayton where he also completed a masters in business administration through the Physician Leadership and Development Program.
Nick was exposed to the IHI Open School during his first year of medical training, and since has led impactful work to address the opioid epidemic both as a medical student and as a resident in the Distinction Program in Care Transformation at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. He was on the campaign leadership team for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Open School Recover Hope Campaign aimed to reduce stigma around substance use disorders. During residency he became one of the founding members of the B-Team, a nationally recognized hospital-based program increasing access to medications for opioid addiction treatment.
He is a “missional” resident living at Community First! Village, a master planned community that provides affordable, permanent housing and a supportive community for men and women coming out of chronic homelessness. He is currently helping cultivate a culture of recovery at Community First! Village through community based participatory research. Nick believes that in order to better serve vulnerable populations we need to rethink how this care is delivered, and also need to more fully understand the needs of the specific populations we seek to serve. Outside of medicine, he plays bass guitar in the indie rock band Fertility House. He is also a member of the Pure Goodness Band, a band comprised of musicians with lived experience of homelessness who reside at Community First! Village.
Dr. Jason Pennington
Jason J. Pennington is a community General Surgeon at The Scarborough Health Network. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery, University of Toronto.
A proud member of the Huron-Wendat Nation Jason grew-up on and around his maternal reserve of Wendake, just North of Quebec City. He moved to Toronto in 1990 to pursue post-secondary studies at the University of Toronto. He completed an Honours Bachelours of Science (Human Biology) a Master’s of Science (Botany) prior to undertaking his MD studies and residency in General Surgery.
While establishing a busy community General Surgery practice with an emphasis on colorectal surgery and proctology, Jason always maintained a commitment to education and Indigenous Health. Decolonizing the UofT medical school has been at the centre of these efforts. Some other endeavours include participation and contribution to several committees at both Cancer Care Ontario and The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. Currently he is the Regional Indigenous Cancer Lead for the Central East Regional Cancer Program (CCO-OH).
Dr. Richard Lester
Dr. Richard Lester is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the WelTel International mHealth Society (WelTel NFP), Chief Scientific Officer of WelTel Incorporated, the Director of the Neglected Global Diseases Initiative (NGDI.ubc.ca) and an Assistant Professor in Global Health in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
He completed his research fellowship in HIV in Kenya at the University of Manitoba and University of Nairobi collaborative, where he initiated development of an innovative mobile phone health (mHealth) service that was demonstrated in a landmark trial, WelTel Kenya1 (Lancet 2010), to improve HIV outcomes funded by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
His program’s ‘research to action’ and patient self-management approach has been published in top-tier medical journals, including the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature. Dr. Lester has consulted on mHealth innovations with the World Health Organization for HIV, TB & tobacco control, and is a CIHR Foundation Scheme recipient and Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar.
Dr. Lester received the 2020 Digital Health Canada CHIA clinical Innovator Award and he continues to conduct studies internationally, in Africa, Canada, and the United States
Dr. Gary Lewis
Dr. Gary Lewis completed his medical training in 1982 at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, followed by specialty training in Internal Medicine and then Endocrinology at the University of Chicago. He joined the staff of the Toronto General Hospital in 1990, was appointed Head of the Division of Endocrinology at University Health Network and Mount Sinai Hospitals in 2001, Director of the University of Toronto Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2008 and Director of the Banting and Best Diabetes Centre, U of T, in 2011. He is a Full Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Physiology, University of Toronto and he holds the Sun Life Financial Chair in Diabetes and the Drucker Family Chair in Diabetes Research.
Dr. Lewis has made a number of important discoveries elucidating the mechanism of blood fat abnormalities in diabetes and prediabetic states. Dr. Lewis has been awarded and honoured by several national and international organizations. He has been invited to present his research findings at numerous universities around the world and at prestigious international meetings.
Dr. Lewis is a Principal Investigator of Diabetes Action Canada, one of the chronic disease networks funded through the Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) Initiative, and undertakes translational research with active patient engagement.
Dr. Allan Best
Allan Best, PhD is Managing Director, InSource Research Group, and Clinical Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia. InSource serves health systems decision makers at the regional, provincial and national levels, offering innovative “whole systems” research, planning, and evaluation tools to support large-scale organizational change. Allan’s research focuses on systems thinking and organizational change ~ creating the teams, models, structures and tools that foster effective knowledge to action for health policy and programs that improve the health of the population.
Allan served as the founding Chair of the Department of Health Studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada, the world's first interdisciplinary department integrating the biological and behavioural sciences to study health promotion. He also served on the inaugural Board of the Canadian Association for Health Services and Policy Research as President-Elect and was President from 2005-2007.
Dr. Carol Herbert
Carol Herbert is Professor Emerita of Family Medicine in the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University (London, Ontario) and Adjunct Professor in the UBC School of Population and Public Health. She is a Senior Associate at In-Source, a Vancouver-based consulting company that applies a complex adaptive systems lens to health care issues. She was formerly Dean at Schulich, Head of the UBC Department of Family Practice, founding Head of the UBC Division of Behavioural Medicine, and a founder of the UBC Institute of Health Promotion Research
Dr. Sandy Buchman
Dr. Sandy Buchman is a palliative care physician and an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Division of Palliative Care at the University of Toronto and McMaster University. He is the Freeman Family Chair in Palliative Care and Medical Director of The Freeman Centre for the Advancement of Palliative Care at North York General. In 2019-2020, he served as President of the Canadian Medical Association and is also a past president of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Ontario College of Family Physicians.
From 2005-2019, he provided home-based palliative and end-of-life care with the Sinai Health System’s Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care and with the Palliative Care and Education for the Homeless (PEACH) Program of Inner City Health Associates in Toronto. Sandy is a founder and medical lead of a new residential hospice, Neshama Hospice, currently being built in the Toronto Area.
He is the 2020 recipient of the W. Victor Johnston Award by the College of Family Physicians of Canada. This award recognizes a renowned Canadian or international family medicine leader for continuous and enduring contributions to the specialty of family medicine in Canada or abroad.