EpiComics

The story of Epi Comics started while talking to some classmates about whether they were going to be going to the comic book convention.  They said they weren’t sure, so we started talking about what they would dress up as if they went.  This was the inspiration of Epi Comics.  An artist was contacted and commissioned for designing the covers.  We expanded the series to some other classmates and they were presented with them as a reminder of their time taking epidemiology and biostatistics classes.  We also tried to put in references to either epidemiology, biostatistics or their thesis.  

Innovation is tough, especially in healthcare. I’ve seen many examples of where “good ideas” should have been embraced, but instead they were ignored or killed. Some of the most interesting advice I have received from healthcare technology entrepreneurs in Canada was to get on a plane and go to the United States. As the US has a more innovative culture, healthcare is profit driven so inefficiencies matter, and there are 10x the hospitals there. So, it makes more sense to “get on a plane” and play the numbers. Its like dating, you can’t make someone like you, so you just need to move one and approach alot more.

This comic was created as a professor who I liked talking with was leaving. Alot of our discussions was around the resistance to innovation in healthcare. At the time I was having difficulties pursuing automated methods for improving literature reviews and machine learning in healthcare. Both of these ideas met alot of resistance.

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This comic book was created for my BioStats II partner when she finished her MSc. At the time she was getting married so I wanted a comic book that spoke of the relationship. I had originally misspelled the word “Causal” with “Casual” and gave it to her.  Only a week later when a friend laughed and told me the word was spelled wrong.  I send a new updated one to Jane, to which she then replied “oh.. that makes more sense now”.

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When I took my first epidemiology class we had an assignment to look at the association between two conditions and adjust for age and sex. This is the typical type of academic paper you often see where they report on the association between X and Y (i.e. hypertension and heart attacks). Coming from a computer science background I thought — why don’t you just through it in a for-loop and report on every possible association. This then lead to looking more at the literature and how health research data is analyzed and reported upon. When people talk about jobs that could be automated in the future, I highly suspect that data analysts will be replaced by intelligent algorithms. University professors probably won’t be replaced as they seem to have some sort of union going and can do basically anything (or nothing or even worse) and still not face the music.

This comic is a graphical representation of a photo of myself and Chris in Zomba, Malawi in 1997 as we worked as international development volunteers. This was before the Internet came to Malawi and Chris and I were both there related to information technology. It was interesting to see some of the things that occurred and this period in my life was really important for me as I learned alot.   

Looking for investors for my Fantastic Idea: “A Retro Computer Coffee Shop” called “FrostByte”. The concept is that vintage computers and software will be displayed like it’s 1984. And when people order stuff (not the coffee) it will always be “out of stock” and “placed on order”. Don’t miss out on this revolutionary business opportunity. ​