GUELPH POLITICAST #473 - Can A.I. Make Public Health Better? (feat. Michael Whyte and Justin Angevaare)

Data is key to guiding health policy, and health units collect a lot of it, but formatting it, organizing it, and looking for patterns in it can be time consuming, meaning that you’re doing a lot of labour that has nothing to do with creating the actual health policy or solving a public health issue. If you’re thinking to yourself that this sounds like an ideal solution for artificial intelligence, you’re right!

At May’s Board of Health meeting, staff members discussed “Innovative Public Health with AI and Automation”, meaning the ways that Public Health is using artificial intelligence to enhance their work. The report offered examples of success like using A.I. to process vaccine records, generate immunization notices, and process lab results. You might have interacted with A.I. yourself if you’ve clicked on the “need help” icon on the Public Health website.

The staff at Public Health are very bullish about the possibilities of artificial intelligence, but for a lot of people there are no two scarier initials right now than "A" and "I". In the realm of public health, there are even more pronounced concerns around privacy and the sharing of information, and there’s also an important need to share accurate information as well. So how are Public Health staff managing these big considerations? 

Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health’s Manager of Data & Analytics Michael Whyte and Data Scientist Justin Angevaare will tell you all about those considerations on this week's pod. They will talk about the work that public health is using A.I. to achieve, and how they've decided the best ways to use it. They also talk about the ways that public health is governing the use of A.I. with policy, how they determine which programs they want to use and why, and what they’re working on right now.

So let's get some good A.I. news on this week's edition of the Guelph Politicast! 

You can learn more about what Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health is up to in the realm of artificial intelligence by reading the staff report from last month’s Board of Health meeting, or Guelph Politico’s coverage of that meeting. You can stay up-to-date on everything to do with public health at their website, or on social media at @wdgpublchealth on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

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Photo courtesy of Disney/Lucasfilm.