Assistant to the President and CEO and Director of the Pôle of Innovation, artificial intelligence and Projects of the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), associate professor at HEC Montréal, professional researcher at the CRCHUM, Kathy Malas is a manager who promotes the integration of care, teaching, research, innovation, including AI, in practices and management of University hospital Centers, in partnership with patients-citizens, employees, the organization and external partners. With a Master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Montreal and a Graduate Certificate in Health Management from McGill University, she promotes open innovation to better meet the health and wellness of patients and their families in interdisciplinary and cross-sector partnerships with all partners in the health ecosystem.
Kathy Malas began her career as a speech-language pathologist and researcher at CHU Sainte-Justine from 2007 to 2012. During these years, Kathy Malas aimed to adopt the best knowledge and practices to continuously improve the care offered to patients and their families. She became the Chief in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology Service from 2012-2014, with a mandate to ensure the quality of care and the integration of the UHC’s missions into professional practices. It was during this time that she discovered her passion for knowledge management and innovation. From 2014-2018, Ms. Malas was the manager of the innovation platform and the chronic and acute disease innovation units at CHU Sainte-Justine. Since 2018 and this at CHUM, Ms. Malas has put in place a cross-functional structure and team dedicated to the management of innovation and AI, positioning innovation at the strategic level. In these roles, she contributed to the establishment of a vision and mission, culture, structures, processes, tools and approaches and an open innovation ecosystem that facilitate the integration of knowledge and innovation, including artificial intelligence, with and for patients-families, teams and partners from all horizons to create more value for all (Brunet, Malas, Fleury, 2021). She launched a social mission enterprise. She is certified in business model and value proposition generation (Strategyzer, 2108, 2019) and AI and machine learning for all (DeepLearningai, 2019; University of London, 2020).
Her numerous achievements include the co-development, co-deployment, impact measurement and sustainability of several organisational, social and digital innovations. She has developed a reflexive approach and tools for integrating the missions of care and services, teaching, research, innovation, management and partnerships, as well as skills development and training programs to increase the capacity to innovate of the CHUM’s stakeholders and beyond. In addition, Kathy Malas contributes to the creation and sharing of knowledge and know-how in innovation management. She is also a guest lecturer at the School of Public Health of the Université de Montréal and a collaborator in several research projects. She has published articles and a book on the management of innovation and has presented at numerous conferences on the management of innovation and AI in health, the links between feeding and swallowing difficulties in early childhood and language disorders.
In 2021, the CHUM Innovation and AI team won two Innovation Awards and Quebec’s Chief Innovator at the MTLTech Award, an award celebrating the creativity and innovation of Quebec companies and innovations that are changing the way we live tomorrow. The CHUM was also ranked the first intelligent hospital in Canada (Newsweek, 2021).
