Finnie Flores, InfoCentral Health Analytics Community Leader

Stepping into the Spotlight

Finnie Flores is a Program Lead in Architecture and Standards at Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and is a founding co-lead of the Health Analytics community on InfoCentral and previously was Co-Lead of Coordination of Care. He is also a Vice-Chair of the Canadian ISO TC/215 Mirror Committee and represents CIHI in jurisdictional health informatics standards councils/committees. He has worked in both private and public sectors and has been involved in health information systems development for both clinical/front-line and health system management uses. He has graduate degrees in public health and education, and studied computer science at the undergraduate level.

We connected with Finnie about his role in the Health Analytics community and to hear his thoughts on how the community can improve patient care and make health care more efficient.

Why do you believe in digital health?

I see tremendous benefits for use of well-designed digital health solutions in the delivery of effective health care to patients. In addition to its use in frontline delivery of care, I also see huge opportunities for its use in improving the health system as a whole. Digital health solutions are great sources of data, which when processed and analyzed, can provide actionable insights for improvement of the health care system.

Why should people care about the Health Analytics community?

One of the objectives for establishing the Health Analytics Community is to provide a forum for members to share experiences and lessons learned and to keep them abreast of what is going on in the Canadian health care landscape as pertains to the scope of the community (e.g. health analytics, data governance, machine learning, etc.). For example, we have hosted presenters from Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and from CIHI sharing their organizations’ direction in and approach to health analytics and other topics such as pan-Canadian health data and information governance. The community is also an excellent venue for networking with colleagues across the country. For instance, members from a couple of jurisdictions have connected through the community which resulted in collaboration between those two jurisdictions.

How do members of the Health Analytics community contribute to digital health innovation in Canada?

The members participate by attending the monthly webinars which give them opportunities to interact with the presenters. The Health Analytics Community has members from across the country and are working in various capacities - clinicians, academics, researchers, providers, vendors, standards specialists, architects, etc. Many are involved in jurisdictional initiatives such as EHR implementations. Others are involved in analytics initiatives to improve cancer care, reduce hospital wait times, development of pan-Canadian surveillance and monitoring system to assess the impacts of climate change on the health and health system, and many other interesting and innovative approaches to digital health.

What are the 2019-20 goals for the Health Analytics Community?

As our community is relatively new – it’s less than a year old, one of our goals for this year is to continue to raise awareness about the community. Another goal that my co-leads and I have is to get to know more our members so we can leverage their vast experiences and also to understand what their interests are so that that the topics presented in the community are relevant to their contexts. We have completed a survey of our membership and we are in the process of reviewing the results.

What are the long-term goals of the Health Analytics Community?

Our long-term goal is for the community to remain relevant to its membership. Some of the ways we aim to achieve this is by ensuring that topics presented are useful and relevant. Additionally, another goal we have is to be able to collaborate as a community to produce some artifacts (e.g. toolkit, etc.) that will be of use to the members.

Can you share a fun fact about you?

My name is derived from the word ‘finish’. Being the last of 10 siblings, my parents decided to name me ‘Finnie’ to indicate that I am the last one.

Connect with Finnie Flores on InfoCentral or LinkedIn.