Dr. Lorraine Shack

Biography

Dr. Shack is the Director of Cancer Advanced Analytics, Cancer Care Alberta, Alberta Health Services and is an Assistant Professor jointly in the Departments of Oncology and Community Health Sciences, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary. She obtained her MSc and PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Medicine, England, completed the Executive Education program within Alberta Health Services as part of the 2018 cohort, and is a Certified Health Executive. She has worked in cancer epidemiology, prevention and surveillance in Scotland, England and Alberta, and currently leads the Cancer Advanced Analytics Department that combines the Alberta Cancer Registry, Data Integrity and Integration, and Surveillance & Reporting teams to support researchers, operations, planning and local/national/international studies in data and linkage to cancer data. She joined Alberta Health Services in 2009 (formerly Cancer Board) from the National Health Service, UK where she led cancer surveillance activities for the North West Cancer Intelligence Service, England. In these roles, and her current role as Director of Surveillance and Reporting, CancerControl Alberta, she has led cancer surveillance and epidemiology work within the health system. These projects have focused on epidemiology research based on cancer registry data and linkage with treatment, comorbidities, risk factors and follow-up with collaboration from clinical and population health experts. This work has included national and international research projects on cancer incidence and outcomes, such as the International Cancer Bench Marking Project, EUROCARE-4 and CONCORD (Global surveillance of cancer survival).

More recent work has focused on system performance measures, the use of administrative data to measure patient treatment pathways and outcomes/survival. She oversees the integration of data systems and more efficient linkage between existing data platforms, with the goal to increase capacity to manage a greater number and greater complexity of data requests. This is the hub of cancer information for AHS registering cancer diagnosis, analyzing and reporting and integrating the data for greater utilization. Dr. Shack also sits on the System Performance and Analytic Capacity Building Canadian Partnership Against Cancer Committees.