Alejandro Jadad

Alejandro Jadad is a prominent Colombian-Canadian physician, researcher, philosopher, writer, and entrepreneur, recognized worldwide as an authority on innovation in digital health (eHealth) and on the application of scientific evidence to transform health care systems. His personal mission has focused on exploring and developing initiatives that enable people to achieve the highest possible levels of health and happiness through innovation that is both global and local. He earned his medical degree and specialty in anesthesiology at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, laying the foundation for a career dedicated to human health.

He continued his education at the prestigious University of Oxford in England, where he subspecialized in pain management and palliative care and earned a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Clinical Medicine. During his time at Oxford, he conducted pioneering research on neuropathic pain and the use of opioids, in addition to developing methods for analyzing data from clinical trials. His work was crucial to the development of the renowned Jadad Scale, a standard tool for assessing the methodological quality of clinical trials, and he made a fundamental contribution to the creation of the Cochrane Collaboration, a global health research network.

In 1995, he moved to Canada, where he joined the University of Toronto. There, he held the federally funded Canadian Chair in eHealth Innovation and founded and directed the Center for Global Innovation in eHealth, which acts as a “future simulator” to promote efforts that transform healthcare services through digital technologies. He also leads the Maimonides Project, a global initiative that seeks to bring together experts from various fields to reimagine how humanity can live, learn, and work better in the 21st century through radical innovation.

Jadad's philosophy posits that true transformation in health must be centered on the human being, and for this reason, it has led the reconceptualization of terms such as “health,” “well-being,” and “happiness” as pillars for the design of new innovations.