Directors

Dr. William Ghali

Past Scientific Director

Dr. Ghali was the Scientific Director of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary from 2010 to 2020. He is also a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary, and a practicing physician specialized in Internal Medicine. He is a principal in the University of Calgary World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre in Disease Classifications and health information. He recently completed two terms as a Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research, and has also been funded as a Senior Health Scholar by Alberta Innovates Health Solutions. Clinically, he is trained as a General Internist (MD [1990] - University of Calgary, FRCP(C) [1994] - Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario), and completed methodological training in health services research and epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health (MPH [1995]).

Dr. Ghali’s research program is in the general area of health services research and his work focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to evaluating and improving health system performance to produce better patient outcomes and improved system efficiency. He leads or co-leads three inter-related research and innovation initiatives: 1) the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcome Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease (APPROACH, www.approach.org); 2) the Ward of the 21^st Century initiative (W21C, www.w21c.org); and 3) the International Methodology Consortium for Coded Health Information (IMECCHI, www.imecchi.org), with strong linkages to the World Health Organization. These three initiatives share the overriding goal of enhancing the use of health information to produce applicable knowledge on system performance and patient outcomes, and through knowledge translation, tangible health system improvements.

Dr. Ghali has held millions of dollars of peer-reviewed research funding from various agencies, and has published over 400 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He has received numerous awards, including a Canadian Top 40 Under 40 Award from the Caldwell Group (2006), the David Sackett Senior Investigator Award from the Canadian Society of Internal Medicine, and Distinguished Alumnus Awards from both the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Medicine (2009) and the Boston University School of Public Health (2001).  He is a Fellow of both the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.  He was featured by the Globe and Mail in April 2012 as the Canadian public health researcher with the highest publication H-index, and has also been named in the Thomson-Reuters listing of the top 1% of most highly cited researchers by discipline.