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Amundeep Chaggar: Charting a New Path in Patient Care
By Garth Finch
Amundeep's hometown: Windsor, Ontario
From nursing to health informatics, across Canada and the United States, Amundeep Chaggar brings a breadth of knowledge to advance healthcare for her patients.
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If there is one thing Amundeep has taken away from her time at Western, it is the wise words of one MHIS professor:
“The job you may be looking for now didn't exist 10 years ago”.
Though Amundeep had heard this saying before, it now holds new meaning for her. She wondered if rather than this new type of job simply waiting for students after they graduate, perhaps students need to play a central role in the development of these exciting career opportunities and carve out their own lane. In the same way these jobs are created in response to new societal demands, those wanting to fill them need to rise to meet the challenge. Amundeep has done just that.
Amundeep had already obtained a nursing degree from the University of Windsor when she decided to pursue a Master of Health Information Science (MHIS), and she is the only master’s student among a team of PhD-level research assistants working under the same supervisor at Western. She has never been afraid to chart her own path in pursuit of a career that will bring about the change she has always wanted to see in her field.
Fun Fact
Amundeep's brother and cousins also work in healthcare as fellow nurses, doctors and dentists. They are a family full of healthcare workers and proud parents!
Prior to studying at Western, Amundeep had the opportunity to work as a registered nurse in different cities across Canada and the US. She was surprised to see fully electronic medical records while working in the US, something that was missing in many Canadian healthcare contexts. This led Amundeep to realize that patient information available through electronic records was not being used to maximum capacity in Canada.
She was fascinated by how data points entered into the system from different sources could be used to improve healthcare delivery and wanted to learn more. The MHIS program at Western gave Amundeep a way to pursue these questions.
“The one thing that pushed me was that I wanted to go get my master’s and help with the integration and utilization of all the points of data that we're collecting,” she says.
Supervised by Dr. Nicole Haggerty, a professor and associate dean with expertise in information systems based at Western’s Ivey Business School, Amundeep studied patient-accessible electronic health records as her major research project. Her findings helped her understand the extent to which data added to electronic systems is used to make frontline healthcare decisions for patients.
Since completing the MHIS program in 2024, Amundeep has been using this research experience to inform her work as an Operating Room Data Quality and Utilization Coordinator for MacKenzie Health, which manages a number of hospitals and health care facilities in the Greater Toronto Area. In this role she uses the same software she used in the US, allowing her to extract and utilize all the data within a patient’s electronic health records.
After moving around different hospitals and gaining an understanding of how others approach common problems, Amundeep is now settling into her work life in Vaughan, Ontario.
In her free time, Amundeep is an avid painter. She has also recently taken up hot yoga, weight training and Pilates. Making time for herself and avoiding burnout is a goal she has maintained since graduating from Western. Encouraging others to do the same, Amundeep says:
“Whatever you do in life, you have to take care and block in [self-care] the same way you would block in time to study. If you have an hour, try to get it in. If you have a setback, you always have tomorrow.”
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Profiles in the Meet Our Students section are written by students in the Master of Media in Journalism & Communication program, who are enrolled in MMJC 9604 - Professional Writing.
