The Ontario government’s effort to fight COVID-19 includes a plan to bring artificial intelligence innovators together with health researchers to study a vast new pool of public health information. The Centre for Advanced Computing at Queen’s will host the platform, the Health Ministry said. The document discloses that there were more than 500 “health information privacy breaches” in 2018 across Ontario, and says that harnessing artificial intelligence could help lower that number. The proposal for the new data platform notes there is “interest and potential” to integrate data held by private companies in order to strengthen the province’s response to COVID-19. As of Sunday, the province’s 34 regional public health units were reporting a total of 320 deaths among 8,021 confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19.

Source: thestar April 13, 2020 09:00 UTC