News

Québec at the strategic hub for big data and artificial intelligence in health care

Annie Perreault, Executive Manager of BIOQuébec, welcomed several
high-level experts from Québec and Massachusetts to a packed room to discuss the topic of the hour: access to big data in health care and data processing with artificial intelligence (AI) – two advances that should revolutionize medical research and practice in the next few years.

This panel of experts created by Investissement Québec, BIOQuébec and the Ministère de l’Économie, de la Science et de l’Innovation, included Québec Health Minister Gaétan Barette; Travis McCready, CEO, MLSC Fund; Sonia Israël, Director, aifred health; Javier Jimenez, VP, Clinical Outcomes, Sanofi; Kyu Rhee, VP, IBM Watson Health; and François Laviolette, Director of the Big Data Research Centre at Université Laval.

The panel, moderated by Robert Coughlin, President and CEO of the Massachusetts Biotech Council, explored the many applications of the use of big data and data processing with AI. The possibilities, some of which have already been achieved, range from prevention of infarctions to personalized medicine to calibration of medications.

Although all the participants were enthusiastic about the emerging possibilities, they also all agreed about the ethical issues, particularly concerning privacy, raised by the use of big data.

Québec is known as a world centre for the development of AI and, due to its centralized public health care system, it possesses many assets enabling it to position itself in this sector, which will shape medicine in the future.

The meeting ended with a presentation on Québec’s AI ecosystem by Sarah Jenna, CEO of My Intelligent Machines (MIMs).

Learn more about Québec’s life sciences sector.