IHPME Special Seminar with Boris Sobolev

IHPME and Dr. Adalsteinn Brown invite you to a special seminar at 263 McCaul Street, Rm. 402 on Friday, October 30^th, featuring Professor Boris Sobolev, School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia. Professor Sobolev will discuss Causality Perspective in Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Background:

Comparative effectiveness research evaluates benefits and harms of alternative treatments.  A causal connection between treatment choice and outcomes can be demonstrated by comparing patients randomly assigned to one of the treatments.  However, not all causal questions can be answered through even well-designed experiments.  For example, questions of attribution (What proportion of patients treated with A would have survived, had they been treated with B?) and questions of susceptibility (What proportion of patients treated with B would have died, had they been treated with A?) cannot be answered with data alone.  Such questions require counterfactual analysis of the observed data, since only the outcome of one treatment alternative can be observed for a given patient. In this talk, I discuss the causality perspective in comparing timing of surgical coronary revascularization.

Biography:

Professor Boris Sobolev is a faculty member of the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. He held the Canada Research Chair in Statistics and Modeling of the Health Care System from 2003-2013. Recently, Prof. Sobolev introduced a new course to the SPPH curriculum: “Causal Inference in Public Health Sciences”. Prof. Sobolev is also a Senior Scientist and Leader of Health Services and Outcomes Research Program at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation, Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute.  Since 2011 he has served as Editor-in-Chief, Handbook of Health Systems Research, a major reference work commissioned by Springer, http://refworks.springer.com/mrw/index.php?id=4082. More information on his area of focus in health services and outcomes research is found at http://spph.ubc.ca/person/boris-sobolev/.

At a Glance:

Friday, October 30, 2015
12:00 to 1:30PM

Boris Sobolev, Professor, School of Population and Public Health, UBC
Causality Perspective in Comparative Effectiveness Research

Department of Medical Imaging, University of Toronto
Room 402, 4th floor, 263 McCaul Street
Toronto, ON M5T 1W7

Refreshments will be provided.