When Unity Health Toronto migrated to Epic, Dr. Derek Beaton's team faced a familiar challenge: the same measures now had different names, technical feeds changed, and every tool they'd built needed to be reconnected to the new system. Derek Beaton, Director of Advanced Analytics at Unity Health Toronto (UHN), joins Patricia Thaine to talk about what that transition actually looked like. The UHN team has been deploying AI tools into clinical practice since 2017, with over 50 solutions now in production across the network. When the Epic migration happened, they spent months mapping old data to new, building monitoring dashboards to catch mismatches early, and prioritizing which tools to bring back online first based on how much historical data they needed. In this episode, Derek walks through the tools his team has built and rebuilt: ChartWatch, which predicts patient deterioration and has shown a 26% reduction in unanticipated mortality; the EDRN nurse assignment tool, which cut scheduling time from 2.5 hours to 3 minutes; and the ED wait time display that shows up on screens at St. Mike's. We also get into why Derek is skeptical of explainability in clinical AI, what interoperability gaps still slow teams down (scheduling systems, documentation formats), and how his team designs evaluation frameworks from the start of every project. Topics covered: Migrating to a unified patient record system and reconnecting pipelinesData monitoring strategies during system transitionsChartWatch: predicting patient deteriorationEDRN: optimizing nurse assignments in the emergency departmentWhy explainability is for data scientists, not necessarily cliniciansThe interoperability gaps no one talks about (scheduling, documentation)Building evaluation frameworks that measure real impactAbout Derek Beaton:Derek leads the Advanced Analytics team in Data Science & Advanced Analytics (DSAA) at Unity Health Toronto. The Advanced Analytics team is comprised of data scientists with exceptional breadth and depth in statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (e.g., evaluation, forecasting, predictive modelling, imaging, workforce analytics). Derek and his team are responsible for developing statistical, machine learning, and AI models that are integrated into clinical and operational workflows at Unity Health Toronto. The advanced analytics team also evaluates and monitors the performance and impact of the tools that DSAA creates. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences and one of the Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative's scholars; his work focused on multivariate methods, multi-modal data, biostatistics, neuroinformatics and translational work in neurodegenerative disorders. Derek has a MS and PhD in Cognition and Neuroscience from The University of Texas at Dallas, where his work was primarily on statistical analyses of big data (e.g., genomics, neuroimaging). Derek is the author of multiple widely used R packages (the ExPosition family of packages), has authored or coauthored over 70 journal publications, and is currently the joint world records holder for the fastest 5 person costumed half marathon and fastest 5 person costumed marathon. Resources & Links: AI at Unity Health: https://unityhealth.to/about-unity-health/ai-at-unity-health/DSAA Blog: https://lks-chart.github.io/blog/Blog Post on Data Monitoring: https://lks-chart.github.io/blog/posts/2025-03-31-love-is-blind-but-data-shouldnt-be-spotting-the-red-flags/Empowering Health Leaders for the AI Era: https://unityhealth.to/2025/12/empowering-health-leaders-for-the-ai-era/AI Tool Study: https://unityhealth.to/2024/09/ai-tool-study/Unity Health Toronto LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/unityhealthtoronto/Derek's Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=rw1kVRcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
