Summary
Objectives: To introduce and summarize current research in the field of Public Health and Epidemiology
Informatics.
Methods: PubMed searches of 2019 literature concerning public health and epidemiology informatics
were conducted and the returned references were reviewed by the two section editors
to select 14 candidate best papers. These papers were then peer-reviewed by external
reviewers to allow the Editorial Committee a curated selection of the best papers.
Results: Among the 835 references retrieved from PubMed, two were finally selected as best
papers. The first best paper leverages satellite images and deep learning to identify
remote rural communities in low-income countries; the second paper describes the development
of a worldwide human disease surveillance system based on near real-time news data
from the GDELT project. Internet data and electronic health records are still widely
used to detect and monitor disease activity. Identifying and targeting specific audiences
for public health interventions is a growing subject of interest.
Conclusions: The ever-increasing amount of data available offers endless opportunities to develop
methods and tools that could assist public health surveillance and intervention belonging
to the growing field of public health Data Science. The transition from proofs of
concept to real world applications and adoption by health authorities remains a difficult
leap to make.
Keywords
Public health - epidemiology - surveillance - medical informatics - International
Medical Informatics Association - data science - ethics
