Artificial Intelligence in Family Medicine (AIFM)

Dr. Rahimi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University, and an affiliated scientist at Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research of the Jewish General Hospital. She is FRQS Junior 1 Research Scholar in human-ceneterd AI for primary health care. With an interdisciplinary background, Dr. Rahimi is interested in the development and implementation of clinical decision support tools and patient decision aids, as well as integrating human-centered AI tools in primary health care. Her work as Principal Investigator has been funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Roche Canada, Brocher Foundation (Switzerland), and the Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR)-Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). 

Dr. Sara Ahmed is a physical therapist and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, McGill University, and Associate Member in Epidemiology and Family Medicine. She received FRSQ junior I and II, and senior research scholar awards and also holds an appointment in the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire en réadaptation and the McGill University Health Center CORE, clinical epidemiology. She is the scientific director of the CFI BRILLIANT (https://www.brilliant-cfi.ca) project that aims to develop transformative methods and technologies for interdisciplinary rehabilitation health professionals to tailor medical and psychosocial interventions to the needs of individuals with chronic conditions. Her research program strives to improve individuals’ function and health-related quality of life in two themes: Theme 1) addressing the challenges of using patient reported outcome measures (e.g. health-related quality of life, self-efficacy) and the use of advanced psychometric approaches for improving the precision and efficiency of outcome evaluations. She also works with clinical teams to implement ePROM toolkits in patient centered-chronic disease management to support clinical decision making, and Theme 2) the development and implementation of digital health solutions and decision support interventions to deliver individualised rehabilitation care and self-management support.

Nicole George completed her Bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology at the University of Windsor (’16), and her Master’s degree in Neuroscience at McGill University (’19). Currently, Nicole is a PhD student in Rehabilitation Science within the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University, under the supervision of Dr. Sara Ahmed. For her doctoral thesis, Nicole intends to examine how a community approach can be applied to the development of a learning health community for chronic pain.

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After completing my studies in medicine, at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Iran, I went to Vancouver, to pursue my education. I worked there as a research assistant for almost four years under the supervision of the professor Siavash Jafari, and worked on a number of papers related to mental health disease, preventive medicine, and substance abuse. I then decided to explore my other side of the interest, pertain to public health and primary care. This new passion has led me to my current position as an MSc Student in Canada’s best university, McGill, to work in primary care medicine at the Department of Family Medicine. I am so honored to have recently started a new position and work with the Dr. Samira Rahimi and Dr. Mark Yaffe to introduce and connect a new notion called” Artificial Intelligence” to the primary healthcare and contribute more to Canada’s mental health promotion.

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Roland Grad is a practising family doctor and researcher at McGill. His research centres around knowledge translation and medical education, with a focus on how health professionals use research-based information. More about his work can be found in his book Look it up! What Patients, Doctors, Nurses, and Pharmacists Need to Know About the Internet and Primary Health Care.

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Pierre Pluye MD PhD is Professor, Department of Family Medicine, McGill University; Associate Member of the School of Information Studies, McGill University; co-Director, Section Expertise, Quebec SPOR SUPPORT Unit (Patient Oriented Research); and Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He has expertise in mixed methods research and mixed studies reviews (including quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods studies). His research program is aimed to better understand and improve information outcomes associated with electronic knowledge resources (information delivery and retrieval, information users' feedback), including outcomes on clinicians, managers, patients and the public.

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Christian Ruchon obtained his Master’s degree at the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University where he studied the occurrence of evidence reversal in randomized controlled trials relevant to primary care. He now works as a Knowledge Translation Coordinator for the Method Development component of the Quebec SPOR SUPPORT Unit. Christian is passionate about quality improvement, research literacy, and evidence-based medicine.

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Michael is an affiliate member of the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University and an appointed investigator at the Lady Davis Institute of the Jewish General Hospital. Michael received his PhD from the McGill School of Information studies, where his research focused on the interdisciplinary information needs of Oncology Specialists, Family Medicine Physicians and Cancer Survivors in the context of Survivorship care. Michael's research interests are in the domain of user experience in clinical informatics applications, with a particular interest in explainable AI and machine learning and its integration into clinical decision support tools and related applications. Michael is currently Associate to the Director of Digital Health at the CIUSSS Centre Ouest Montreal.

Dr. Vedel conducts health services research in chronic disease management. Her research focuses on the implementation, evaluation, and organization of primary health care services for older patients and patients with chronic diseases using mixed methods (chart review, surveys, interviews, focus groups, analysis of administrative databases). She also works on the adoption and impact of health information technologies by healthcare professionals in the context of chronic disease management, interdisciplinary and inter-organizational care. She is the co-founder, and scientific director of the pan-Canadian research team “Recherche sur l’Organisation des Services de santé pour l’Alzheimer” (Research on the Organization of Health Services for Alzheimer) ROSA funded by CIHR. She has received continuous research funding from various organizations, including Fonds de recherche Québec Santé (FRQS), CIHR, Ministère de la santé et des services sociaux du Québec, Ministère de la santé de France.

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Hao Zhang is a PhD student at the Department of Family Medicine under the supervision of Dr. Tibor Schuster. Her work is supported by Fonds de la recherche en sante du Quebec (FRQS) and the Quebec Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research Support for People and Patient-Oriented Research and Trials (SPOR-SUPPORT) Unit at the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) with a goal of incorporating Bayesian methods, machine learning methods and other statistical approaches to improve cost-efficiency in primary care.

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