Unity Health interview part 1 of 3
In this first interview, Muhammad Mamdani (VP of Data Science and Advanced Analytics at Unity Health Toronto), shares his experiences of integrating artificial intelligence into healthcare.
This is the first in a series (other parts: part 2 and part 3) of interviews with leaders from Unity Health Toronto, including Muhammad Mamdani (Vice-President of Data Science and Advanced Analytics), Michael Page (Director of AI Commercialization), and Derek Beaton (Director of Advanced Analytics), discussing the organization's pioneering efforts in integrating artificial intelligence into healthcare. They share their strategies, challenges, and successes in deploying AI-driven solutions that improve patient outcomes, enhance operational efficiency, and address real-world clinical problems. In collaboration with clinicians, researchers, and technology partners, Unity Health demonstrates how AI is reshaping the future of healthcare.
Read more about AI at Unity Health (unityhealth.to).
Congratulations Muhammad Mamdani on receiving the 2024 Recognition Award from Canada’s Drug Agency! Could you share what this award signifies for you and Unity Health? How does it reflect your work with integration of AI in healthcare?
- It was a tremendous honour to receive the 2024 Recognition Award from Canada’s Drug Agency. The award highlights the importance of rigorously evaluating health technologies to ensure the healthcare system receives tangible benefits from existing and emerging technologies given its often limited resources.
- At Unity Health, we are dedicated to carefully identifying genuine healthcare problems amenable to AI, methodically developing AI solutions by working closely with end-users, deploying AI solutions in a responsible manner, and rigorously evaluating the impacts of our AI solutions.
- Through this extensive process, we are able to better understand the benefits, and sometimes failures, of AI solutions in healthcare.
Can you tell me about Unity Health and your role in the Canadian healthcare system?
- Unity Health Toronto is a publicly funded non-profit and charitable healthcare network that serves the Toronto community. Formed in 2017 through the merger of three healthcare organizations: Providence Healthcare, St. Joseph's Health Centre, and St. Michael's Hospital. The network operates several hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities across the city of Toronto, providing a wide range of comprehensive healthcare services to patients.
St. Michael's Hospital, a Tier-1 trauma centre and academic hospital, is one of the largest and busiest hospitals in the city, and provides acute care services, including emergency care, critical care, and specialized surgery.
St. Joseph's Health Centre is a community hospital offering a range of acute care and community health services.
Providence Healthcare focuses on rehabilitation, long term care and complex continuing care.
- Unity Health Toronto is also committed to education and research, with close ties to the University of Toronto. Notably, Unity Health Toronto is an industry leader, being the only hospital network in Canada to declare AI as a core strategic pillar, as well as establishing an applied health AI program.
What is your strategy – is Unity Health mainly an innovator or early adopter within AI? What impact does your choice of strategy have?
- With the endorsement of our Board of Directors and Executive Committee, Unity Health is strategically positioned as an AI Innovator. That means we actively create and implement AI solutions. Innovation carries inherent risks, including potential failures and associated costs. However, these risks are outweighed by the significant benefits we are already seeing in how data science is improving patient outcomes and operational efficiency. As one of the few healthcare organizations at the forefront of AI-driven care, we are excited to help shape the future of healthcare. Being an innovator, however, may require substantial investment of resources and a willingness to accept (and pay for) failure on the path to success.
- We also recognize other innovators in this space and help facilitate Unity Health Toronto’s ability to use cutting-edge technology created beyond our walls. Our strategy also acknowledges the value of being early adopters of proven technologies developed by other hospitals and private companies. This is an area where we want to improve and lead. When a solution to a shared problem already exists, we be able to implement it swiftly, reducing unnecessary development efforts and maximizing our focus on impact. But adopting new solutions has its own challenges, such as monitoring or verifying the impact of solutions created elsewhere. This dual approach ensures that we remain both leaders in AI innovation and efficient adopters, balancing pioneering efforts with adopting pragmatic, high-value solutions.
Could you give me an overview of how you have chosen to organize AI at Unity Health and the organizational units you have? Also, where is your AI organization located in relation to the whole organization of Unity Health?
- This is an important question and one that we frequently revisit as AI continues to evolve, especially in healthcare. Given that AI is still relatively new, we’ve explored various organizational structures to foster innovation.
- We initially began as a traditional health research group, fueled by a generous $10 million (CAD) donation from the Li Ka Shing Foundation to our St. Michael’s Hospital Foundation. This philanthropic support is crucial in Canada and played a pivotal role in jumpstarting our AI journey. With this funding, we invested in building out our technical infrastructure, which took several years but enabled us to mature as an organization. Over time, the hospital began seeing substantial impact from our data-driven projects.
- Recognizing this, our CEO, Dr. Tim Rutledge, and the hospital executive made the strategic decision to formally embed our data science group into hospital operations under the name "Data Science and Advanced Analytics" (DSAA). While we are part of the Information and Technology group, we operate independently, with extensive collaboration in areas like IT security, privacy, risk, and data governance.
- Our DSAA team is structured into five distinct groups:
Product Management (PM): This team oversees product lifecycle management, including problem identification and project management. They work closely with clinical teams to lead deployments and handle change management for AI adoption.
Data Integration and Governance (DIG): The DIG team consists of data engineers responsible for critical tasks such as ETL processes from source systems to our own, data acquisition, building data pipelines, maintaining data warehouses, overseeing the infrastructure to develop and deploy these solutions,, and managing privacy and data governance for the data used in our projects.
Advanced Analytics: (AA) a team of data scientists that apply advanced analytical approaches that span statistical, machine learning, and deep learning approaches as well as operations research and optimization to develop data-driven models to solve hospital-wide problems.
Product Development (PD): The PD team builds solutions that tie together data pipelines from the DIG team and models from the AA team. The PD team has expertise in human factors, design, and software development and focuses on front-end development, ensuring that the AI tools we build are user-friendly and meet the needs of our end-users (e.g. clinicians and administrative decision-makers).
AI Commercialization: The newest addition to our team, this group is responsible for expanding our AI tools to other hospitals and seeking alternative funding sources to further our AI advancements in healthcare. Unity Health Toronto has now formally partnered with two start-ups in health AI and has started to work with several private sector partners to co-develop health AI solutions with the intent to scale them globally.
“It's not just about building the technology—it's about embedding AI into the culture and operations of the hospital in a way that enhances patient care and staff workflows.”
What are the biggest challenges you face in implementing AI technologies in a healthcare setting?
- There isn’t just one big challenge when implementing AI in healthcare—it's a complex, multifaceted process. AI in healthcare is still in its infancy when it comes to real-world application. While there’s tremendous research happening globally, only a small number of healthcare providers are crossing the "innovation chasm" from research to actual AI deployment in clinical settings. This gap presents a range of challenges, as we are among the few pushing these technologies into real-world use with actual patients.
- Perhaps the foundational challenge is identifying the ‘right’ health problem that may be amenable to AI. While the healthcare system is fraught with challenges, many of them may be solved with better processes and/or resource allocation rather than AI solutions. Some relevant problems may not have the necessary quantity or quality of data to enable AI solution development. Other problems may not have community buy-in or engagement to enable successful adoption. Finding the right problem that is amenable to AI with readily available, timely, and high quality data with full end-user engagement can often be challenging.
- On a related note, it is critical to have strong leadership buy-in and understanding of AI's potential and limitations. This applies to both clinical and administrative leaders, who must be aligned and well-informed to champion AI initiatives. At Unity Health, we've taken steps to address this by running AI education sessions and implementing staff training programs to help both our clinical and non-clinical teams understand how to interact with the AI tools we develop. It's not just about building the technology—it's about embedding AI into the culture and operations of the hospital in a way that enhances patient care and staff workflows.
What role do you think AI will play at Unity Health over the next 5 to 10 years?
- We anticipate that AI will play an increasingly strategic role at Unity Health over the next 5 to 10 years. While we firmly believe that healthcare must remain human at its core, AI has the potential to transform many facets of care. Our focus is on how these tools can empower our clinicians and administrators to deliver data-driven, and possibly accelerated, care without losing the essential human touch.
- Having already deployed more than 50 AI and analytics tools into clinical practice, we've spent considerable time reflecting on our next steps. Our goal is to expand the role of AI and analytics across every aspect of the organization. Moving forward, we foresee substantial growth in our AI team to conduct more cutting-edge research and to streamline the translation of AI innovations into everyday clinical practice.
- A key priority for us will be strengthening collaborations, particularly with initiatives like GEMINI, to test the scalability of our tools using data that represents a large number of hospitals across Ontario. This will help us ensure that our solutions are robust and impactful on a larger scale.
- We are also embracing multimodal AI by developing appropriate infrastructure to enable its application and are starting to explore agentic AI for subspecialized tasks and AI-enabled automation in a safe and responsible manner. At the same time, we focus on applied tools and in many cases still favor more “traditional” statistical, ML, and optimization tools that are well suited to solve problems
- Finally, we are committed to deepening our partnerships, both locally and internationally. Our work with AI Sweden and hospitals across Sweden has been a great start. In the future, we aim to create even more AI partnerships, foster the development of AI companies, and expand our solutions to benefit patients not just in Canada but globally.
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