Much thanks to Jose Vergara  for sending me a link to an article on Dr. Alejandro Jadad.  Jose Vergara, aka Frankie Jazz, as some readers may remember, is a Cartagena native and talented artist in his own right.

We try to keep up with each other – so he knows all about my interest in Colombian medicine and surgery, and I love his new album (so I try not to gush and be too much of a groupie when I hear from him) but he recently sent me a link to one of his more recent projects.   The Voxxi article by Silvia Casablanca is pretty interesting, so I wanted to share it with readers.

For starters – Jose Vergara is the photographer for the article..

Dr. Alejandro Jadad, MD, PhD

But it’s the life of Dr. Alejandro Jadad that is so inspiring..  Dr. Jadad is a Colombian anesthesiologist, textbook author and founder of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation in Toronto, Canada (among other things).  He has been credited with being one of the major innovators in the fields of clinical research, medicine and information technology.

While at Oxford, as a research fellow in Anesthesiology, he developed a validation tool (the Jadad scale) to critically evaluate and analyze clinical research studies.  This is an important tool to distinguish the quality (and value) of individual research studies – or how much weight a study (and its findings) should have.   We talk about the importance of objective scales and measures quite a bit here at Bogotá Surgery, and the Jadad scale is one of the best known and most widely used scales for clinical research.

Clinical research is how surgeons know whether a patient has a better chance for survival with surgery or chemotherapy/ radiation, for example.

So as you can imagine – having a tool like this is particularly vital when talking about clinical medicine / or health research where the findings of research studies are used to guide and determine medical decisions – aka the medical treatments for people like in our example above.

As the Casablanca article points out – Dr. Jadad didn’t stop with writing textbooks and creating the Jadad scale.  After completing his fellowship in the United Kingdom, he moved to Ontario, Canada to continue his research at McMaster University.   Since then, he has continued to innovate and create tools to help both clinicians and the public.  One of the ways he helps clinicians is by further creating and refining tools to evaluate medical research.

He has also been a major creator and contributor to the development of internet and computer based applications to connect doctors and their patients.  His efforts are based on more that the patient – provider dyad, and are part of a larger, global framework for reforming and transforming healthcare.

More about Dr. Alejandro Jadad, MD, PhD

Casablanca, Silvia (2013, January).  Dr. Alejandro Jadad: Redefining health and  making it global.  Voxxi [on-line article].

(Canadian) Pioneers for Change

“Making Longer Life Worth Living“, lecture by Dr. Jedad at Singularity webblog as part of the ‘Singularity University lecture’ series.

More about Jose Vergara / Frankie Jazz

Frankie Jazz – wikipedia page

Vimeo page

Let Me Take My Way – which is one of my personal favorites…