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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Yearb Med Inform 2021; 30(01): 004-007
DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-1726541
Editorial

Health Data, Information, and Knowledge Sharing for Addressing the COVID-19

Lina F. Soualmia
1   Normandie Université, Univ. Rouen, TIBS-LITIS EA 4108, Rouen, France
2   Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, INSERM UMR_S1142, LIMICS, Paris, France
,
Kate Fultz Hollis
3   Oregon Health & Science University Department of Biomedical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Portland, Oregon, USA
,
Fleur Mougin
4   Univ. Bordeaux, INSERM, BPH, U1219, Bordeaux, France
,
Brigitte Séroussi
2   Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, INSERM UMR_S1142, LIMICS, Paris, France
5   Assistance Publique — Hôpitaux de Paris, Hôpital Tenon, Paris, France
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Summary

Objectives: To introduce the 2021 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook by the editors.

Methods: The editorial provides an introduction and overview to the 2021 IMIA Yearbook whose special topic is “Managing Pandemics with Health Informatics - Successes and Challenges”. The Special Topic, the keynote paper, and survey papers are discussed. The IMIA President's statement and the IMIA dialogue with the World Health Organization are introduced. The sections’ changes in the Yearbook Editorial Committee are also described.

Results: Health informatics, in the context of a global pandemic, led to the development of ways to collect, standardize, disseminate and reuse data worldwide: public health data but also information from social networks and scientific literature. Fact checking methods were mostly based on artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The pandemic also introduced new challenges for telehealth support in times of critical response. Next generation sequencing in bioinformatics helped in decoding the sequence of the virus and the development of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines.

Conclusions: The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic shows the need for timely, reliable, open, and globally available information to support decision making and efficiently control outbreaks. Applying Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) requirements for data is a key success factor while challenging ethical issues have to be considered.

Keywords

Medical Informatic - health information technology - IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics - COVID-19 - pandemic


Publication History

Article published online:
03 September 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/)

Georg Thieme Verlag KG
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