Emergency Medicine: New Faculty Appointment - Joseph Choi
Dr. Joseph Choi is currently staff in the emergency department at University Health Network. He completed his residency in emergency medicine at McGill University. During his subspecialty year, he completed a one-year Master's of Public Health (MPH) at Harvard School of Public Health, with a focus in healthcare management and policy. His master's allowed him to participate in quality improvement (QI) initiatives at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as part of their operations committee and to gain experience at a large academic medical centre.
Dr. Choi’s academic and scholarly interests are in quality and innovation to improve operations in the emergency department (ED) as it interfaces with the community and the hospital system. He is interested in improving performance by eliminating waste, optimizing flow and streamlining processes, and to reduce unnecessary practice variation to achieve optimal patient outcomes and how information technology can help to achieve these goals.
Dr. Choi was co-lead on a project that led to introducing changes in the CPOE system to reduce unnecessary solitary blood cultures by 71% in the two Emergency Departments at UHN. Another project standardized the management of positive blood clusters in the ED by creating a management algorithm. Since its inception a year ago, the pathway has had excellent uptake and feedback. He has already disseminated this pathway to other EDs and submitted a grant proposal to the AHSC AFP Innovation Fund to further develop this system into a province-wide, open access platform to incorporate local microbiologic data to provide clinical decision support at the point of care. In addition, he has multiple other QI projects currently underway at UHN including a collaborative project with Princess Margaret Cancer Centre to improve the timely delivery of antibiotics to patients with febrile neutropenia. He has received two UHN EM QI awards for two of his projects this year and is an engaged member of the ED Quality Committee.
