Research Interests

Health Informatics

My PhD research in health informatics, focusing on social network analysis and knowledge transfer/management. I am interested in how SNA can be applied to online communication amongst healthcare practitioners to better understand both how online communication differs from regular forms of communication, and how this information can be leveraged to improve patient care. Working with the Pediatric Pain Management group at the IWK on a project developing PPM in Thailand, my hope is to leverage online communication forums in order to facilitate tacit and experiential knowledge transfer between practitioners.
I am also interested in the inherent knowledege embedded within electonic communications, and how this knowledge can be extracted, organized and leveraged to improve the overall knowledge base. My knowledge linkage project has developed an infobutton to automatically link conversations around clinical problems to published medical literature about that subject.
Other HI subjects I'm interested include incorporating Decision Support Systems into Electronic Medical Records, developing Case Based Reasoning systems that work with EMR data, automatic data parsing and data retrieval, and health systems use.

Statistics

As a statistician I work almost exclusively with the R statistical programming language for analysis, and have developed two libraries for it: longRPart is an extension of the rpart library for building classification trees for longitudinal outcomes. ResearchMethods is a set of interactive R programs built using the tcltk library that help demonstrate the ideas behind common statistical processes.

Publications

  • Stewart SA and Abidi, SSR (2012) An Infobutton For Web 2.0 Clinical Discussions: The Knowledge Linkage Framework. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine: 16(1), January 2012, 129-135. Pubmed Citation
  • Stewart SA and Abidi, SSR. (2012) Using Social Network Analysis to Study the Knowledge Sharing Patterns of Health Professionals Using Web 2.0 Tools. In Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies: 4th International Joint Conference, BIOSTEC 2011, Rome, Italy, January 26-29, 2011, Revised Selected Papers. publication forthcoming.
  • Wing A, Hill-Taylor B, Sketris I, Smith J, Stewart S, Hurley KF. Medication Records in the Emergency Department: Agreement Between Paper-Based Charts and Automated Dispensing Device. CJHP. 2012 Aug;65(4): Web 20 Aug 2012
  • 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. paper here