My current research is in Health Informatics, where I am working with the online communications of healthcare practitioners. The first goal of this research is to link practitioner communications to pertinent medical literature, to help provide explicit knowledge to accompany the tacit knowledge within the messages. As well I am working on applying social network analysis to these messages, to understand how clinicians communicate and how this knowledge can be leveraged to improve the communication process.
This project speaks to the general focus of my HI research: knowledge management. I'm also interested in leveraging personal patient data to incorporate into clinical decision support systems, and then building these systems into point-of-care tools.
As a statistician my interests are in non-parametric classification, computational statistics and education. I have published two libraries for the R statistical langauge, one that provides interactive tools to students to aid in the learning process (ResearchMethods), the other extending the traditional classification tree functions in R to longitudinal outcomes (longRPart). I am also interested in literate statistical analysis, and how to properly present statistical results for optimal effect.
Instructor - HINF6030: Statistics For Health Informatics(Graduate Studies, Dalhousie University, Fall 2010)
``The study of advanced statistical techniques appropriate to health research and information management, including the appropriate uses of each technique, its strengths and weaknesses. It will also focus on deriving the meaning of the information based on the techniques used. This course provides an opportunity for students to learn and understand the basic principles that underlie health data analysis and interpretation of results. Students will acquire the necessary skills to carry out a wide range of statistical analyses, and will become familiar with the SAS statistical package.''
Responsible for course design, lectures and evaluation
Guest Lecturer - Evidence Based Medicine(Department of Medicine, Medicine Year 1, Dalhousie University, Fall 2010)
Provided three lectures on statistical issues:
Hypothesis Testing
Basic lecture about the process of performing hypothesis tests in medical research
Making Sense of Results: Common Statistical Tests
A followup to the first lecture, this lecture covers the details of interpreting results, including p-values, power and error rate, interpreting regression, etc... Uses specific examples from the literature
Survival Analysis
Explanation of the theory, methods and use of survival analysis
Stewart S. and Sibte Raza Abidi S. (2011). UNDERSTANDING MEDICINE 2.0 - Social Network Analysis and the VECoN System. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics, pages 70-79. DOI: 10.5220/0003167100700079
Stewart S, Abidi SS, Finley A. Pediatric pain management knowledge linkages: mapping experiential knowledge to explicit knowledge. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2010; 160: 1184-8.
Davis S, Abidi SS, Stewart S.A compositional personalization approach for designing personalized patient educational interventions for cardiovascular risk management. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2010; 160: 629-33.
Stewart S, Abidi SSR, Finley GA.Linking specialized online medical discussions to online medical literature. In Denecke K et al. (Eds) Using Web Data in the Medical Domain - Proc 1st Intl Workshop on Web Science and Information Exchange in the Medical Web (MedEx 2010). Raleigh, NC.
http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-572/paper4.pdfhttp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-572/paper4.pdf
Sam Stewart. Knowledge Linkages: Augmenting Online Clinical Care Discussions with Published Literature. Presented at Med 2.0'10 Conference, Maastricht, NL. November 30, 2010.
Sam Stewart. Social Network Analysis: Understanding Online Communication Patterns. Presented to the Dalhousie Health Informatics Research Network, November 17, 2009.
Sam Stewart. Linking Electronic Conversations to Pertinent Medical Literature: The Pediatric Pain Mailing List. Presented at the APICS Conference, October 24, 2009.
Sam Stewart, M. Abdolell. Custom classification trees in R: the longRPart package. Presented at the annual meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada, June 1, 2009, Vancouver BC.
Also presented at the useR conference , Jully 10, 2009, Rennes, France.
M. Abdolell, J. Payne, J. Caines, Sam Stewart, W. Lou. An Open-Source Model for Automated Public Health Surveillance Systems: the case of the Nova Scotia Breast Screening Program. Presented at the Dalhousie University Department of Diagnostic Radiology Annual Research Day, April 29, 2008, Halifax, NS.
Robert Abraham, Mohamed Abdolell and Sam Stewart. Development of an Online IR Teaching Manual with Blackboard Learning System (BLS) and Podcasting. Presented at Society of Interventional Radiology Annual Meeting, March 7-12, 2009, San Diego, CA.
M. Abdolell, J. Payne, J. Caines, Sam Stewart, W. Lou. An Open-Source Model for Automated Public Health Surveillance Systems: the case of the Nova Scotia Breast Screening Program. Poster presented at the joint annual meeting Statistical Society of Canada & Societe francaise de Statistique, May 27, 2008, Ottawa ON.
Also presented at the Canadian Public Health Association Annual Conference, June 3 2008, Halifax, NS.
M. Abdolell, M. LeBlanc, Sam Stewart. Multivariate Regression Trees. Poster Presented at the joint annual meeting Statistical Society of Canada & Societe francaise de Statistique, May 27, 2008, Ottawa ON.
