Students are Making an Impact With Their Research in the MSc Health Systems Program

Congratulations to students in the M.Sc. Health Systems Program at the Telfer School of Management on their recent research successes. “Our students learn a great deal about research methods and how these can be applied to tackle critical problems in the healthcare system,” said Professor Craig Kuziemsky, Director of the M.Sc. Health Systems Program. “As we welcome a new M.Sc. cohort this month, we’re proud to see that many of our recent students have published or presented their thesis research in distinguished academic forums.” The following are some recent examples:

• Javier Fiallos (MSc 2013) developed an evaluation tool to assess the performance of Emergency Physicians, according to criteria such as resource utilization, patient throughput and quality of care. Javier worked with a team made up of Dr. Ken Farion, Medical Director, Quality and Systems Improvement at CHEO and the Telfer School’s Wojtek Michalowski, Professor of health informatics, to present his research at the prestigious American Medical Informatics Association symposium in 2013.
• Seyed Izad Shenas (MSc 2013) used data mining techniques to identify high cost patients. The study focused on the use of two data mining techniques (neural networks and decision trees) to build predictive models to identify very high-cost patients among the general population. Working with the Telfer School’s Professor Bijan Raahemi and Professor Craig Kuziemsky and Mohammad Tossein Tekieh of the CHEO Research Institute, Seyed published the results of his research in the journal Computers in Biology and Medicine.
• Kate McNaughton (MSc 2013) published a qualitative study examining how roles are constructed within interprofessional health care teams. In collaboration with Professor Samia Chreim, a specialist in business management and healthcare management, and Professor Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, CIHR Chair in Gender, Work and Health Human Resources, Kate examined different types of role boundaries, the influences on role construction and the implications for professionals and patients, such as the impact on professional satisfaction and patient wait-times.

“These are all excellent examples of the kind of research successes we are seeing among students in the MSc program,” noted Professor Kuziemsky. “The students are contributing new knowledge in several influential areas of health systems research – benefitting from our unique access to healthcare settings and the opportunity to work with leading researchers.”