Alejandro R. Jadad Bechara

Alejandro (Alex) Jadad (born August 9, 1963, Montería, Colombia, South America) is a physician, educator, researcher and public advocate.

Early life
Born and educated in Colombia, he obtained his medical degree in 1986 from Javeriana University. While still a teenaged medical student, he collected the largest data set on jargon, chemical composition and clinical implications of cocaine base abuse in Colombia, becoming an internationally sought after speaker. At age 25, and before completing his residence in anesthesiology at Javeriana University, he co-authored his first book, Neuroanesthesia and Neurosurgical Critical Care with Dr. Mario Ruiz, a leading Colombian anesthesiologist affiliated with Santa Fe de Bogota Foundation. This was the first textbook in this area ever published in Spanish.

In 1988, he married Martha Lucia Garcia, a biochemist from Javeriana University, with whom he had two daughters, Alia and Tamen. In 1989, he received a British Council Scholarship that enabled him to become a Research Fellow at the Oxford Pain Relief Unit, Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics, University of Oxford. In 1992, he received an Overseas Research Student Award from the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom for work on the opioid responsiveness of neuropathic pain, and became a doctoral student at Balliol College, University of Oxford. In 1994, he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Clinical Medicine after completing a thesis entitled Meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials in pain relief, becoming one of the first physicians in the world with a doctorate on knowledge synthesis, under the supervision of Henry J. McQuay, Professor in Pain Relief, University of Oxford, and the co-supervision of Iain Chalmers, then Director of the UK Cochrane Centre, Oxford. His examiners were Drs. David Sackett, then Oxford Professor of Evidence-based Medicine and Adrian Grant, Director of the Health Services Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen. His thesis involved the development of new tools to distill high-quality health-related information, new methods to build specialized bibliographic databases to support health-related decisions, and the validation of the most widely used tool to assess the quality of clinical trials in the world (‘the Jadad scale’).

The Jadad Scale
The Jadad scale is not the only, or always most appropriate, way to assess trial quality, but it is the most widely used, and appears to produce robust and valid results in an increasing number of empirical studies. The scale includes three items that are directly related to bias reduction: randomization; blinding; description of withdrawals and drop outs. These are presented as questions to elicit ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers and produces scores from 0 to 5. A trial could be judged as having poor quality if it is awarded 2 points or less. Studies that obtain 2 or less points have been shown to produce treatment effects which are 35% larger, on average, than those produced by trials with 3 or more points. Although some concerns have been expressed about the inter-observer reliability of the assessments, the scale has been cited over 1,600 times in the biomedical literature and has been used successfully to identify systematic differences in over 300 reviews of trials in many areas of health care.

Life in Canada
While at Oxford, in the early 1990s, Dr. Jadad met Dr. Murray Enkin who had recently co-authored his opus Effective Care in Pregnancy and Childbirth (regarded as one of the 100 most influential books in health services and policy of all times) with Drs. Iain Chalmers and Marc Keirse. Dr. Enkin persuaded Dr. Jadad to continue his research at McMaster University, in Canada, where he stayed from 1995 until 1999. During this period, he was Chief of the Health Information Research Unit; Co-Director of the Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre; Associate Medical Director of the Program in Evidence-based Care of Cancer Care Ontario; Founding Director of the McMaster Evidence-based Practice Centre (the first of its kind funded by the US government in a foreign country); and Professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics. He was the founding Chair of the Consumer Health Informatics Working Group of the International and the American Medical Informatics Association. In 1998, his best-selling book Randomised Controlled Trials was published and launched by the British Medical Journal as part of the 50th anniversary of clinical trials in health care.

In 2000, Dr. Jadad moved to Toronto, as the Rose Family Chair in Supportive Care; Director of the Program in eHealth Innovation and Professor in the Departments of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation ; and Anesthesia. During the following 5 years, he led the creation of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, a simulator of the future of the health system, to study and optimize the use of ICTs before their introduction into the health system. The construction of the Centre was supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the University Health Network, where it is located. During the same time, he led the development of virtual clinical tools to transform the encounter between patients and health professionals, and new ways to use ICTs to respond to major public health threats (e.g., obesity, pandemics) and to enable the public (particularly young people) to shape the health system and society. During this period, he was instrumental in the creation of the Spanish eHealth Network and the development of Revista eSalud, the leading journal and portal in the Hispanic world focused on eHealth.

In 2002, Dr. Jadad was named the Canada Research Chair in eHealth Innovation (Tier 1). In 2004, he received the Canadian-Latinamerican Achievement Award in recognition for his contributions to the relationships between Canada and the Hispanic world. In 2005, Dr. Jadad initiated a new effort, known as the Global eHealth and eWellness Network Initiative (GENI, pronounced as ‘genie’), which seeks to explore innovative ways to promote optimal levels of health and wellbeing through the use of ICTs. Areas of interest include technologically-assisted vital environments, social networks and virtual supportive communities, new modalities of tele-work and tele-mentoring, robotic applications to improve quality of life and innovations in entertainment. GENI is currently fostering strong partnerships within the Hispanic world and the British Commonwealth. In 2007, he was invited by the British Medical Journal to write an essay highlighting the role of computers as one of the 15 most important breakthroughs in medicine since 1840, when the journal was published for the first time, as part of a commemorative issue marking the journal’s transformational efforts at the dawn of the 21st century. Dr. Jadad currently advises the World Health Organization as a member of its Global Observatory for eHealth’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE).

WebCasts

 * http://mmedia03.cce.hp.com/hp_health/012/
 * http://www.en-code.es/encode/html_eng/03_ponentes/034_jadad.asp

Articles

 * http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/334/suppl_1/s8
 * http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7402/1293
 * http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1490187

Awards and recognition
1992-1994	Overseas Research Student Award, Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals                   of the Universities of the United Kingdom

1997-2002	National Health Research Scholar Award - National Health Research and Development Program, Canada

1998	Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Award (awarded in April 1999)

1999 	Jose Maria Cordoba Science and Technology Medal, Government of Cordoba, Colombia

1999-2004	Premier’s Research Excellence Award, Ontario Ministry of Energy, Science and Technology

2000-			Inaugural Rose Family Chair in Supportive Care

2000	Spinoza Professor, Academic Medical Centre and Faculty of Medicine, University of Amsterdam

2001	New Pioneers Award in Science and Technology [Presented by Skills for Change, Canada]

2003	American Academy of Pain Medicine/Pfizer Visiting Professorship Award, Johns Hopkins University

2004 	Canadian Latin American Achievement Award for the most important contribution to Latin American-Canadian relations by a Hispanic person

2005 	One of the Best of the Best, as selected by fellow Top 40 Under 40 in Canada, in the category of Health and Science

2006 Chief Scientist Lecturer Award, Health Canada

Books

 * Randomised Controlled Trials: A user's guide