Portrait of David Buckeridge

David Buckeridge

Associate Academic Member
Full Professor, McGill University, Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health

Biography

David Buckeridge is a professor at the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University, as well as chief digital health officer for the McGill University Health Centre and executive scientific director of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

A Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Health Informatics and Data Science, Buckeridge has projected health system demand for the Canadian province of Quebec, led data management and analytics for the Canadian Immunity Task Force, and supported the World Health Organization in monitoring global immunity to SARS-CoV-2. He has an MD from Queen's University, an MSc in epidemiology from the University of Toronto and a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada.

Current Students

PhD - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University

Publications

Applied artificial intelligence in healthcare: Listening to the winds of change in a post-COVID-19 world
Arash Shaban-Nejad
Martin Michalowski
Simone Bianco
John S. Brownstein
Robert L Davis
Assessing the potential for virtualizable care in the pediatric emergency department.
Esli Osmanlliu
Brett Burstein
Robyn Tamblyn
INTRODUCTION There is increasing interest for patient-to-provider telemedicine in pediatric acute care. The suitability of telemedicine (vir… (see more)tualizability) for visits in this setting has not been formally assessed. We estimated the proportion of in-person pediatric emergency department (PED) visits that were potentially virtualizable, and identified factors associated with virtualizable care. METHODS This was a retrospective analysis of in-person visits at the PED of a Canadian tertiary pediatric hospital (02/2018-12/2019). Three definitions of virtualizable care were developed: (1) a definition based on "resource use" classifying visits as virtualizable if they resulted in a home discharge, no diagnostic testing, and no return visit within 72 h; (2) a "diagnostic definition" based on primary ED diagnosis; and (3) a stringent "combined definition" by which visits were classified as virtualizable if they met both the resource use and diagnostic definitions. Multivariable logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with telemedicine suitability. RESULTS There were 130,535 eligible visits from 80,727 individual patients during the study period. Using the most stringent combined definition of telemedicine suitability, 37.9% (95% confidence interval (CI) 37.6%-38.2%) of in-person visits were virtualizable. Overnight visits (adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 1.16-1.37), non-Canadian citizenship (aOR 1.10-1.18), ethnocultural vulnerability (aOR 1.14-1.22), and a consultation for head trauma (aOR 3.50-4.60) were associated with higher telemedicine suitability across definitions. DISCUSSION There is a high potential for patient-to-provider telemedicine in the PED setting. Local patient and visit-level characteristics must be considered in the design of safe and inclusive telemedicine models for pediatric acute care.
Global SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence from January 2020 to April 2022: A systematic review and meta-analysis of standardized population-based studies
Isabel Bergeri
Mairead Whelan
Harriet Ware
Lorenzo Subissi
Anthony Nardone
Hannah C. Lewis
Zihan Li
Xiaomeng Ma
Marta Valenciano
Brianna Cheng
Lubna Al Ariqi
Arash Rashidian
Joseph Okeibunor
Tasnim Azim
Pushpa Wijesinghe
Linh-Vi Le
Aisling Vaughan
Richard Pebody
Andrea Vicari
Tingting Yan … (see 9 more)
Mercedes Yanes-Lane
Christian Cao
David A. Clifton
Matthew P. Cheng
Jesse Papenburg
Niklas Bobrovitz
Rahul K. Arora
Maria D Van Kerkhove
Modeling electronic health record data using an end-to-end knowledge-graph-informed topic model
Yuesong Zou
Ahmad Pesaranghader
Ziyang Song
Aman Verma
Impact of a vaccine passport on first-dose COVID-19 vaccine coverage by age and area-level social determinants in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario: an interrupted time series analysis
Jorge Luis Flores Anato
Huiting Ma
M. Hamilton
Yiqing Xia
Sam Harper
Marc Brisson
Michael P. Hillmer
Kamil A. Malikov
Aidin Kerem
Reed Beall
S. Baral
Ève Dubé
Sharmistha Mishra
Mathieu Maheu‐giroux
Background: In Canada, all provinces implemented vaccine passports in 2021 to increase vaccine uptake and reduce transmission in non-essenti… (see more)al indoor spaces. We evaluate the impact of vaccine passport policies on first-dose COVID-19 vaccination coverage by age, area-level income and proportion racialized. Methods: We performed interrupted time-series analyses using vaccine registry data linked to census information in Quebec and Ontario (20.5 million people [≥]12 years; unit of analysis: dissemination area). We fit negative binomial regressions to weekly first-dose vaccination, using a natural spline to capture pre-announcement trends, adjusting for baseline vaccination coverage (start: July 3rd; end: October 23rd Quebec, November 13th Ontario). We obtain counterfactual vaccination rates and coverage, and estimated vaccine passports' impact on vaccination coverage (absolute) and new vaccinations (relative). Results: In both provinces, pre-announcement first-dose vaccination coverage was 82% ([≥]12 years). The announcement resulted in estimated increases in vaccination coverage of 0.9 percentage points (p.p.;95% CI: 0.4-1.2) in Quebec and 0.7 p.p. (95% CI: 0.5-0.8) in Ontario. In relative terms, these increases correspond to 23% (95% CI: 10-36%) and 19% (95% CI: 15-22%) more vaccinations. The impact was larger among people aged 12-39 (1-2 p.p.). There was little variability in the absolute impact by area-level income or proportion racialized in either province. Conclusions: In the context of high baseline vaccine coverage across two provinces, the announcement of vaccine passports led to a small impact on first-dose coverage, with little impact on reducing economic and racial inequities in vaccine coverage. Findings suggest the need for other policies to further increase vaccination coverage among lower-income and more racialized neighbourhoods and communities.
Timeliness of reporting of SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence results and their utility for infectious disease surveillance
Claire Donnici
Natasha Ilincic
Christian Cao
Caseng Zhang
Gabriel Deveaux
David A. Clifton
Niklas Bobrovitz
Rahul K. Arora
Protective effectiveness of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection and hybrid immunity against Omicron infection and severe disease: a systematic review and meta-regression
Niklas Bobrovitz
Harriet Ware
Xiaomeng Ma
Zihan Li
Reza Hosseini
Christian Cao
Anabel Selemon
Mairead Whelan
Zahra Premji
Hanane Issa
Brianna Cheng
L. Abu-Raddad
M. D. Kerkhove
Vanessa Piechotta
Melissa M Higdon
Annelies Wilder-Smith
Isabel Bergeri
Daniel R Feikin
Rahul K. Arora … (see 2 more)
Minal K Patel
Lorenzo Subissi
Background We aimed to systematically review the magnitude and duration of the protective effectiveness of prior infection (PE) and hybrid i… (see more)mmunity (HE) against Omicron infection and severe disease. Methods We searched pre-print and peer-reviewed electronic databases for controlled studies from January 1, 2020, to June 1, 2022. Risk of bias (RoB) was assessed using the Risk of Bias In Non-Randomized Studies of Interventions (ROBINS-I)-Tool. We used random-effects meta-regression to estimate the magnitude of protection at 1-month intervals and the average change in protection since the last vaccine dose or infection from 3 months to 6 or 12 months. We compared our estimates of PE and HE to previously published estimates of the magnitude and durability of vaccine effectiveness (VE) against Omicron. Findings Eleven studies of prior infection and 15 studies of hybrid immunity were included. For prior infection, there were 97 estimates (27 at moderate RoB and 70 at serious RoB), with the longest follow up at 15 months. PE against hospitalization or severe disease was 82.5% [71.8-89.7%] at 3 months, and 74.6% [63.1-83.5%] at 12 months. PE against reinfection was 65.2% [52.9-75.9%] at 3 months, and 24.7% [16.4-35.5%] at 12 months. For HE, there were 153 estimates (78 at moderate RoB and 75 at serious RoB), with the longest follow up at 11 months for primary series vaccination and 4 months for first booster vaccination. Against hospitalization or severe disease, HE involving either primary series vaccination or first booster vaccination was consistently >95% for the available follow up. Against reinfection, HE involving primary series vaccination was 69.0% [58.9-77.5%] at 3 months after the most recent infection or vaccination, and 41.8% [31.5-52.8%] at 12 months, while HE involving first booster vaccination was 68.6% [58.8-76.9%] at 3 months, and 46.5% [36.0-57.3%] at 6 months. Against hospitalization or severe disease at 6 months, hybrid immunity with first booster vaccination (effectiveness 95.3% [81.9-98.9%]) or with primary series alone (96.5% [90.2-98.8%]) provided significantly greater protection than prior infection alone (80.1% [70.3-87.2%]), first booster vaccination alone (76.7% [72.5-80.4%]), or primary series alone (64.6% [54.5-73.6%]). Results for protection against reinfection were similar. Interpretation Prior infection and hybrid immunity both provided greater and more sustained protection against Omicron than vaccination alone. All protection estimates waned quickly against infection but remained high for hospitalisation or severe disease. Individuals with hybrid immunity had the highest magnitude and durability of protection against all outcomes, reinforcing the global imperative for vaccination.
MixEHR-Guided: A guided multi-modal topic modeling approach for large-scale automatic phenotyping using the electronic health record
Yuri Ahuja
Yuesong Zou
Aman Verma
Synthetic data as an enabler for machine learning applications in medicine
Jean-Francois Rajotte
Robert Bergen
Khaled El Emam
Raymond Ng
Elissa Strome
Automatic Phenotyping by a Seed-guided Topic Model
Ziyang Song
Yuanyi Hu
Aman Verma
Electronic health records (EHRs) provide rich clinical information and the opportunities to extract epidemiological patterns to understand a… (see more)nd predict patient disease risks with suitable machine learning methods such as topic models. However, existing topic models do not generate identifiable topics each predicting a unique phenotype. One promising direction is to use known phenotype concepts to guide topic inference. We present a seed-guided Bayesian topic model called MixEHR-Seed with 3 contributions: (1) for each phenotype, we infer a dual-form of topic distribution: a seed-topic distribution over a small set of key EHR codes and a regular topic distribution over the entire EHR vocabulary; (2) we model age-dependent disease progression as Markovian dynamic topic priors; (3) we infer seed-guided multi-modal topics over distinct EHR data types. For inference, we developed a variational inference algorithm. Using MixEHR-Seed, we inferred 1569 PheCode-guided phenotype topics from an EHR database in Quebec, Canada covering 1.3 million patients for up to 20-year follow-up with 122 million records for 8539 and 1126 unique diagnostic and drug codes, respectively. We observed (1) accurate phenotype prediction by the guided topics, (2) clinically relevant PheCode-guided disease topics, (3) meaningful age-dependent disease prevalence. Source code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/li-lab-mcgill/MixEHR-Seed.
Estimating the lagged effect of price discounting: a time-series study on sugar sweetened beverage purchasing in a supermarket
Hiroshi Mamiya
Alexandra M. Schmidt
Erica E. M. Moodie
BioCaster in 2021: automatic disease outbreaks detection from global news media
Zaiqiao Meng
Anya Okhmatovskaia
Maxime Polleri
Yannan Shen
Guido Powell
Zihao Fu
Iris Ganser
Meiru Zhang
Nicholas B King
Nigel Collier