Congratulations to Making Waves recipient, Conor Newcombe

Photo: Conor Newcombe pictured with his colleagues who he credits much of the team’s success due to their dedication. L-R: Hari Giridharan, Navya Jayapal, Conor Newcombe, Anmol Sidhu 

The Nova Scotia Health community includes staff, clinicians and other frontline healthcare workers, researchers and volunteers across the province who work tirelessly each day to ensure that Nova Scotians are receiving the highest quality care and services.  

The Nova Scotia Health Making Waves awards program honors these individuals and groups who have significantly contributed to the health and well-being of Nova Scotians.   

While the Research, Innovation and Discovery team at Nova Scotia Health celebrates all of this year’s Making Waves award recipients, we would like to specifically recognize those within our research and innovation community.  

Conor Newcombe leads the artificial intelligence and machine learning operations team within the department of strategy, performance and analytics and is the recipient of the Innovator Award.  

Tell us a bit about yourself; what you do, where you are located and your favourite part about what you do. 

My team is based out of Nova Scotia Health’s Performance Centre in Halifax, but I’m always eager to travel across the province to meet with front-line staff. My role is to oversee the design, development and maintenance of Nova Scotia Health’s in-house artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning solutions: everything from ingesting and transforming data to training models and developing software applications. 

Our AI solutions are only made possible by adopting innovative approaches and technologies within the organization. Across the team’s software application portfolio, we have users from emergency departments, inpatient units, the patient access and flow network, perioperative services and more. Each has unique challenges which we try to alleviate using AI. My favourite part about my job is witnessing the adoption of new solutions (such as emergency department wait times, with around one million views to date). It’s rewarding to see after the long hours of coding we’re making a positive impact on our health system. 

How do you feel your work contributes to the health and wellbeing of Nova Scotians? Why is it important? 

Nova Scotians rightly expect nothing less than efficient and effective healthcare. Although each of our projects deliver solutions to meet specific needs, at a high-level, they all provide data-driven insights to users, leading to better informed decision-making. We harness AI to deliver these insights. It can account for considerably more data than any single human could comprehend, swiftly bringing together data from disparate systems, with years of history, to render interpretable answers. Efficient and effective healthcare depends upon sound decision-making, faced with growing pressures in a complex world, AI is crucial to ensuring this for Nova Scotians, for now and in future. 

What does it mean to you to receive this award? 

Making Waves Awards have highlighted the work of brilliant world-renowned colleagues in past years and I am deeply honoured and humbled to be a recipient and peer in this regard. My team works tirelessly to deliver results, but still made the time to nominate me, for which I am sincerely grateful. 

Innovation is at the heart of all we do in our department and receiving this award is especially encouraging. To be recognized for my contributions to innovation at Nova Scotia Health is immensely validating. 

As a recipient of this award, how do you hope to inspire others who are working to make a difference in the lives of Nova Scotians each day? 

Each project brings its own set of challenges, often ones completely new to us. Despite prior research and planning, our first, second, or even third attempt at a solution may fail: be it technologically infeasible, unfit for purpose, too operationally expensive, or otherwise. This is normal and expected, so I reframe these challenges and approach them with excitement, turning them into opportunities for learning, thinking unconventionally and generating innovation. 

It's important to be mindful of previously established technologies/methodologies/processes, where opportunities for innovation can be hidden, or worse, ignored. We have to make sure not to fall into the fallacy that it’s better to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done, because we shouldn’t break what isn’t broken. There are always opportunities to improve upon prior solutions and very few are ever 100 per cent perfect, so why settle?  

If I always settled for my first solution to a problem, be it within my team, or within my projects, I would be doing a disservice to Nova Scotians. Continuous improvement is required to deliver top quality healthcare, and we should never settle for anything less.