Alex Jadad


Alex Jadad is a Canadian-Colombian physician-scientist, clinical epidemiologist and public health scholar. His work focuses on evidence-based medicine, networks of trust, simulation scenarios, digital health, end-of-life care and human-machine collaboration. He is also known as the developer of the Jadad Scale, the first validated tool to assess the methodological quality of clinical trials, and the Founder of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation in Toronto, a simulator of the future of healthcare and medicine.
In 2021, he became member of the global Public Health Leadership Coalition, a group assembled by the World Federation of Public Health Associations from members of over 130 national and international public health organizations, to propose evidence-informed options with which to tackle existential threats in the 21st century.

Early life and education

Born in Medellín, Colombia, Jadad earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from Xavierian Pontifical University in Bogotá in 1986, specializing in anesthesiology in 1990. In the early 1980s, while a medical student, he conducted studies on the jargon, the chemical composition and the clinical implications of an emerging drug of abuse, called 'basuco', later known as "crack" cocaine.
In 1990, he became a Clinical Research Fellow at the Oxford Pain Relief Unit of the , University of Oxford, United Kingdom. In 1992, he enrolled as a doctoral student in Balliol College, the oldest school in the University of Oxford, where he received in 1994 the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Medicine. His doctoral thesis, entitled "Meta-analysis of Controlled Trials on Pain Relief", contributed to the development of methods for analyzing big data, identifying and synthesizing health information, and influenced the formation of the Cochrane Collaboration. He has also received honorary doctorates from St. Xavier University in and the Open University of Catalonia in Spain, for his contributions to health and innovation.

Areas of interest

Pain relief

During his time at Oxford, Jadad conducted clinical research on multiple analgesic modalities, and demonstrated that neuropathic pain could be relieved by opioids.
As part of his doctoral work, he led the creation of the largest database of clinical trials in pain relief, developing new methods to optimize searches of the US National Library of Medicine, complementing them with manual screening of over 1.3 million pages of scholarly journals since 1948 to 1990. This resulted in the compilation of over 8,000 citations of clinical trials on pain relief, and new statistical techniques for the combination of their results, which provided the foundations for the Cochrane Pain, Palliative Care and Supportive Care Collaborative Review Group.
He was also one of the inaugural members of the Initiative on Methods, Measurement, and Pain Assessment in Clinical Trials, an international collaborative effort to develop consensus reviews and recommendations for improving the design, execution, and interpretation of clinical trials of treatments for pain.

Evidence-based decision-making

Jadad's doctoral thesis also included the development of the Jadad scale, the first validated tool to assess the methodological quality of clinical trials in the world. As of October 2025, it had been cited more than 25,000 times in the biomedical literature, being used to identify systematic differences among studies of the same healthcare interventions in more than 10,000 reviews of research in virtually all areas in the healthcare sector.
In 1995, he joined McMaster University in Canada. During this period, he was Director of the Health Information Research Unit; Co-director of the Canadian Cochrane Centre and Network, Associate Medical Director of the Program in Evidence-based on Cancer Care Ontario, and the Founding Director of the McMaster Evidence-based Practice Center, and Professor in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
In 1998, Jadad authored the book with which the British Medical Journal celebrated the 50th anniversary of modern clinical trials. A new edition, co-written with Murray Enkin, was published in 2007.

Supportive, palliative and end-of-life care

In 2000, Jadad joined the University of Toronto as Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and Inaugural Rose Family Chair in Supportive Care, conducting research on the concepts of health and end-of-life care, innovations aimed at supporting individuals with chronic or terminal illnesses, conditions associated with a "good death" and the perspectives of healthcare staff perspectives on end-of-life care.
In 2013, he co-authored the World Innovation Summit for Health's report 'Dying Healed: Transforming End-Of-Life Care through Innovation', and effort led by Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett, designed to promote best national practices and a global agenda for optimal care at the end of life.

Digital health

In 2000, he also became the Founding Director of the Program in eHealth Innovation and Professor in the Department of Anesthesia in the University of [Toronto Faculty of Medicine|Faculty of Medicine], and in the at the University of Toronto. In this capacity, he led the creation of the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation,, a simulator of the future, to study and optimize the use of the information and communication technologies before their introduction into the health system. To support this work, in 2002, Jadad was awarded the Canada Research Chair in eHealth Innovation, which he held until . During this period, he led some of the earliest key studies on the language of digital health; patterns of Internet use among health professionals and patients; ways to improve people's ability to evaluate the quality of online health information; the effect of virtual communities on health; new approaches to use online tools to promote evidence-based decision-making in healthcare; and new ways of using digital tools to respond to major threats to public health ; while anticipating and assessing the risk of harm associated with digital technologies, including wearable devices.

Global collaborative efforts

The meaning of ‘health’

In 2008, Jadad led a global conversation about the meaning of health through the British Medical Journal. This effort included contributions from experts in 52 countries, and resulted the conceptualization of health as 'the ability to adapt and manage' the physical, mental or social challenges faced by individuals or communities throughout life. In 2018, such efforts led to the description of an integrated network of services that enabled 88.6% and 93.1% of its users to experience positive levels of self-reported health and well-being, while ranking first when compared with the performance of the health systems of the 36 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Trust among payers, service-providing institutions, professionals and users of health services was the key to achieving these results with only 25% of the average expenditure across the OECD.

Complex chronic disease management

In 2010, he was the Editor-in-Chief of When people live with multiple chronic diseases: A collaborative approach to an emerging global challenge, a book co-created globally using digital technologies. The same year, he chaired and convened the Global People-Centred eHealth Innovation Forum in the European Ministerial Conference.
Jadad also conducted research showing that only 2% of clinical trial reports published in top journals included patients with multiple chronic diseases explicitly, limiting the clinical value of research evidence in this area, and motivating calls for study designs aligned with the needs of the group that is responsible for most of the expenditures in the healthcare system.

Public health leadership

From 2016 to 2019, he was Director of the , in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, a tenure that followed the Global Summit 'Creating a Pandemic of Health', an international event that he co-hosted.
In 2019, he became a member of the Council of the Wise, a group of 43 experts in eight different areas charged by the government of Colombia to produce recommendations about the future of the country in the following 25 years.
In 2021, he was selected as one of the members of the , a group assembled by the to foster evidence-informed decisions and bold new ways to tackle the most pressing threats to the health and survival of humanity in the 21st century.
In 2024, he co-chaired the health track of the World Design Policy Conference in San Diego, California, bringing together experts from around the world to imagine and identify the building blocks of a trust-based, positive-sum, scalable and resilient health system for all in the 21st century.

Selected publications

Scholarly articles

  • Jadad, AR. Basuco. Revista Colombiana de Anestesiologia. 13:257–267
  • Jadad, A.R; Carroll, D; Glynn, C.J; McQuay, H.J; Moore, R.A. Morphine responsiveness of chronic pain: double-blind randomised crossover study with patient-controlled analgesia. The Lancet. 339 :1367–1371.
  • Jadad AR, Carroll D, Moore A, McQuay H. Developing a database of published reports of randomised clinical trials in pain research. Pain. 66 :239–46.
  • Jadad AR, Browman GP. The WHO analgesic ladder for cancer pain management: stepping up the quality of its evaluation. JAMA. 274:1870-3.
  • Jadad, AR, Moore, RA, Carroll, D; Jenkinson C; Reynolds DJM, Gavaghan D, McQuay HJ. Assessing the quality of reports of randomized clinical trials: Is blinding necessary?. Controlled Clinical Trials. 17:1–12.
  • Jadad AR, Cook DJ, Browman GP. A guide to interpreting discordant systematic reviews. CMAJ. 156:1411-6.
  • Jadad AR, Gagliardi A. Rating health information on the Internet: navigating to knowledge or to Babel?. JAMA. 279:611-4.
  • Jadad, AR.. Promoting partnerships: challenges for the internet age. BMJ. 319:761-764.
  • Jadad, AR, Haynes RB, Hunt D, Browman GP.. The Internet and evidence-based decision-making: a needed synergy for efficient knowledge management in health care. CMAJ. 162:362-365.
  • Eysenbach G, Jadad AR.. Evidence-based patient choice and consumer health informatics in the Internet age. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 3:e841.
  • Crocco AG, Villasis-Keever M, Jadad AR. Analysis of cases of harm associated with use of health information on the internet. JAMA. 287:2869-71.
  • Jadad AR, Rizo CA, Enkin MW.. I am a good patient, believe it or not. BMJ. ''326, 1293-1295.
  • Oh H, Rizo C, Enkin M, Jadad A.. What is eHealth : a systematic review of published definitions. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 7:e110.
  • Jadad AR, Enkin MW, Glouberman S, Groff P, Stern A.. Are virtual communities good for our health?. BMJ. 332:925-926.
  • Jadad AR., Enkin MW.. Computers: transcending our limits?. BMJ. 334:s8-s8.
  • Jadad AR, O’Grady L.. How should health be defined?. BMJ. 337:a2900.
  • Smith R, O'Grady L, Jadad AR.. In search of health. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 15:743-744.
  • Shachak A, Jadad AR.. Electronic health records in the age of social networks and global telecommunications. JAMA. 303:452-453.
  • O’Grady L, Jadad A.. Shifting from shared to collaborative decision making: a change in thinking and doing. J''ournal of Participatory Medicine. 2:1-6.
  • Enkin M, Jadad AR, Smith R. "Death can be our friend". BMJ. 343: d8008.
  • Bender JL, Yue RYK, To MJ, Deacken L, Jadad AR.. A lot of action, but not in the right direction: systematic review and content analysis of smartphone applications for the prevention, detection, and management of cancer. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 15: e2661.
  • Jadad AR, Fandiño M, Lennox R. Intelligent glasses, watches and vests… oh my! Rethinking the meaning of “harm” in the age of wearable technologies. JMIR mHealth and uHealth. 3:e3565.
  • Jadad AR.. Creating a pandemic of health: What is the role of digital technologies?. Journal of Public Health Policy. 37 : 260–268. doi:10.1057/s41271-016-0016-1. ISSN 1745-655X. PMID 27899800. S2CID 29935476.
  • Jadad AR, Jadad Garcia TM. From a Digital Bottle: A Message to Ourselves in 2039. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 21:e16274.
  • Rogosnitzky M, Berkowitz E, Jadad AR. Delivering benefits at speed through real-world repurposing of off-patent drugs: the COVID-19 pandemic as a case in point. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance. 6:e19199.
  • Zaman M, Espinal-Arango S, Mohapatra A, Jadad AR. What would it take to die well? A systematic review of systematic reviews on the conditions for a good death. The Lancet Healthy Longevity. 2:e593-600.
  • Jadad AR. ’. Journal of Public Health Policy. 42:651.
  • Jadad-Garcia T; Jadad AR.. The Foundations of Computational Management: A Systematic Approach to Task Automation for the Integration of Artificial Intelligence into Existing Workflows. arXiv:2402.05142.
  • Jadad-Garcia T, Jadad AR. Cracking the code: Lessons from 15 years of digital health IPOs for the era of AI. arXiv:2410.02709.

    Books

  • Jadad AR. Medical education, professional practice and drug abuse among physicians Xavierian University Press, Bogota, 1988
  • Ruiz AM, Jadad AR. The neurosurgical patient: anesthetic and intensive care: Copilito Press, 1989 . Granada: Andalusian School of Public Health, 2010
  • Jadad AR. The Feast of Our Life: Flourishing through self-love. Beati Press, 2016
  • Herrera-Molina E, Jadad-Garcia T, Librada S, Alvarez A, Rodriguez Z, Lucas MA, Jadad AR. Beginning from the End: How to transform end of life care by bringing together the power of healthcare, social services and the community. 1st edition. Seville, Spain: New Health Foundation, 2017
  • Jadad AR, Arango A, Sepulveda JHD, Espinal S, Rodriguez DG, Wind KS. Unleashing A Pandemic of Health from the workplace: Believing is seeing. 1st edition, Toronto: Beati Press, 2017.
  • Serra M, Ospina-Palacio D, Espinal S, Rodriguez D, Jadad AR. Trusted networks: the key to achieve world-class outcomes on a shoestring. 1st edition, Toronto: Beati Press, 2018.
  • Espinosa N, Anez M, Serra M, Espinal S, Rodriguez D, Jadad AR. Toward sustainable well-being for all: People, communities, organizations, societies and creatures. Toronto: Beati Press. 2020.
  • Jadad A, Jadad-Garcia T. . Crown/Penguin Random House. 2023.