New $1M research chair in Waterloo to improve health care delivery

Waterloo, ON – September 17, 2004 – A new research chair has been announced at the University of Waterloo, called the NSERC/Agfa executive industrial research chair in health informatics.

NSERC and Agfa HealthCare will each contribute $500,000 over five years to the project. Professor Dominic Covvey, the new chairholder, is the founding director of the Waterloo Institute for Health Informatics Research (WIHIR). Established in June 2003, WIHIR is a multi-disciplinary collaboration which brings together more than 50 researchers from 17 departments and schools at UW to address information-related challenges in health and the health care system.

"With this Chair, WIHIR will be able to undertake major, collaborative, transdisciplinary programs in fundamental health informatics research in areas like health care workflow, business process management and the economics of health information systems," says Professor Covvey. "Business process modelling and workflow research involves computer-based techniques for representing and supporting human work processes. Our objective in this research is to enable an efficient and effective health care system."