Alejandro Jadad
Physician and philosopher, a reference in health innovation. He inspires with his integral look on life, transmitting that true medicine unites science, empathy and human sense to generate authentic wellbeing.
Biography / Speaker Info
Alejandro Jadad is a leading Colombian-Canadian physician, researcher, philosopher, writer and entrepreneur, recognized worldwide as an authority on digital health innovation (eHealth) and the application of scientific evidence to transform health systems. His personal mission has been focused on exploring and developing initiatives that enable people to achieve the highest possible levels of health and happiness, through innovation that is simultaneously global and local. He earned his degree as a surgeon and specialist in anesthesiology from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, laying the foundation for a career dedicated to human health.
His training continued at the prestigious University of Oxford, England, where he sub-specialized in pain relief and palliative care, and obtained a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Clinical Medicine. During his time at Oxford, he conducted pioneering research on neuropathic pain and opioid use, as well as generating methods for distilling clinical trial data. 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 was instrumental in 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 Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, which acts as a simulator of the future to promote efforts to transform wellness services through digital technologies. He also leads the Maimonides Project, a global initiative that seeks to convene experts from diverse fields to re-imagine how humanity can live, learn and work better in the 21st century through radical innovation.
Jadad's philosophy postulates that true transformation in health must be human-centered, and he has therefore led the reconceptualization of concepts such as "health", "wellness", and "happiness" as pillars for the design of new innovations.
