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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Yearb Med Inform 2021; 30(01): 017-025
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1726478
Keynote

Managing Pandemics with Health Informatics: Successes and Challenges

Mujeeb A. Basit
1   Clinical Informatics Center, UT Southwestern, Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
2   Department of Internal Medicine, UT Southwestern, Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
,
Christoph U. Lehmann
1   Clinical Informatics Center, UT Southwestern, Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
3   Departments of Pediatrics, Population & Data Sciences, and Bioinformatics, UT Southwestern, Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
,
Richard J. Medford
1   Clinical Informatics Center, UT Southwestern, Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
2   Department of Internal Medicine, UT Southwestern, Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA
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Summary

Introduction: The novel COVID-19 pandemic struck the world unprepared. This keynote outlines challenges and successes using data to inform providers, government officials, hospitals, and patients in a pandemic.

Methods: The authors outline the data required to manage a novel pandemic including their potential uses by governments, public health organizations, and individuals.

Results: An extensive discussion on data quality and on obstacles to collecting data is followed by examples of successes in clinical care, contact tracing, and forecasting. Generic local forecast model development is reviewed followed by ethical consideration around pandemic data. We leave the reader with thoughts on the next inevitable outbreak and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusion: COVID-19 must be a lesson for the future to direct us to better planning and preparing to manage the next pandemic with health informatics.

Keywords

COVID-19 - SARS-COV-2 - 2019 novel coronavirus disease - pandemics - mass immunization - COVID-19 testing - public reporting of healthcare data - communicable diseases - medical informatics


Publication History

Article published online:
21 April 2021

© 2021. IMIA and Thieme. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

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