The IHI Rochester Report 2022 on Healthcare Informatics Research: Resuming After the CoViD-19.

In 2020, the CoViD-19 pandemic spread worldwide in an unexpected way and suddenly modified many life issues, including social habits, social relationships, teaching modalities, and more. Such changes were also observable in many different healthcare and medical contexts. Moreover, the CoViD-19 pandemic acted as a stress test for many research endeavors, and revealed some limitations, especially in contexts where research results had an immediate impact on the social and healthcare habits of millions of people. As a result, the research community is called to perform a deep analysis of the steps already taken, and to re-think steps for the near and far future to capitalize on the lessons learned due to the pandemic. In this direction, on June 09th-11th, 2022, a group of twelve healthcare informatics researchers met in Rochester, MN, USA. This meeting was initiated by the Institute for Healthcare Informatics-IHI, and hosted by the Mayo Clinic. The goal of the meeting was to discuss and propose a research agenda for biomedical and health informatics for the next decade, in light of the changes and the lessons learned from the CoViD-19 pandemic. This article reports the main topics discussed and the conclusions reached. The intended readers of this paper, besides the biomedical and health informatics research community, are all those stakeholders in academia, industry, and government, who could benefit from the new research findings in biomedical and health informatics research. Indeed, research directions and social and policy implications are the main focus of the research agenda we propose, according to three levels: the care of individuals, the healthcare system view, and the population view.

Erratum to: Data-driven identification of temporal glucose patterns in a large cohort of nondiabetic patients with COVID-19 using time-series clustering.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/jamiaopen/ooab063.].

Characterizing Temporal Patterns in Glucose Dysregulation Following SARS-CoV-2 Infection

IMPACT: Understanding the longitudinal glucose changes following SARS-CoV-2 infection can inform point-of-care guidelines and elucidate the viral hypothesis of diabetes mellitus pathogenesis. OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Hyperglycemia has emerged as an important manifestation of SARS-CoV-2 infection in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients. Whether clinically-detectable glycemic changes persist following SARS-CoV-2 infection remain to be elucidated. This work aims to characterize temporal patterns in glucose dysregulation following SARS-CoV-2 infection. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Electronic health records of patients with a diagnosis of COVID-19, positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2, and negative history of Diabetes Mellitus prior to infection were extracted from the TriNetX database. 7,502 patients with at least one blood glucose value 2 years to 2 weeks before, 2 weeks before to 2 weeks after, and 2 weeks after to 1 year after COVID-19 diagnosis were used for analysis. Temporal patterns are characterized by training state-of-the-art clustering algorithms, including fuzzy short time-series clustering, k-means for longitudinal data, and spectral clustering. Clustering performance is evaluated using internal evaluation metrics of the Silhouette coefficient, Calinski-Harabasz score, and Davies Bouldin index. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Based on the success of prior clustering methods with random blood glucose measurements, we anticipate that the proposed time-series clustering algorithms will appropriately characterize temporal patterns of glycemic dysregulation. The best performing algorithm based on interval evaluation metrics will be selected for further analysis. Associations between blood glucose values and cluster membership will be evaluated using Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA and effect size will be calculated using unbiased Cohen’s d. Clinical phenotypes for each cluster will be characterized in terms of current diagnoses, prior medication use, pertinent laboratory tests, and vital signs. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: A clearer understanding of the longitudinal glucose changes following SARS-CoV-2 infection can elucidate clinically-detectable patterns of glycemic dysregulation, identify sub-phenotypes of patients who are more susceptive to glycemic dysregulation, and inform appropriate point-of-care guidelines.

Data-driven identification of temporal glucose patterns in a large cohort of nondiabetic patients with COVID-19 using time-series clustering.

OBJECTIVE: Hyperglycemia has emerged as an important clinical manifestation of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in diabetic and nondiabetic patients. Whether these glycemic changes are specific to a subgroup of patients and persist following COVID-19 resolution remains to be elucidated. This work aimed to characterize longitudinal random blood glucose in a large cohort of nondiabetic patients diagnosed with COVID-19. MATERIALS AND METHODS: De-identified electronic medical records of 7502 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 without prior diagnosis of diabetes between January 1, 2020, and November 18, 2020, were accessed through the TriNetX Research Network. Glucose measurements, diagnostic codes, medication codes, laboratory values, vital signs, and demographics were extracted before, during, and after COVID-19 diagnosis. Unsupervised time-series clustering algorithms were trained to identify distinct clusters of glucose trajectories. Cluster associations were tested for demographic variables, COVID-19 severity, glucose-altering medications, glucose values, and new-onset diabetes diagnoses. RESULTS: Time-series clustering identified a low-complexity model with 3 clusters and a high-complexity model with 19 clusters as the best-performing models. In both models, cluster membership differed significantly by death status, COVID-19 severity, and glucose levels. Clusters membership in the 19 cluster model also differed significantly by age, sex, and new-onset diabetes mellitus. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: This work identified distinct longitudinal blood glucose changes associated with subclinical glucose dysfunction in the low-complexity model and increased new-onset diabetes incidence in the high-complexity model. Together, these findings highlight the utility of data-driven techniques to elucidate longitudinal glycemic dysfunction in patients with COVID-19 and provide clinical evidence for further evaluation of the role of COVID-19 in diabetes pathogenesis.

Human activity pattern implications for modeling SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: SARS-CoV-2 emerged in December 2019 and rapidly spread into a global pandemic. Designing optimal community responses (social distancing, vaccination) is dependent on the stage of the disease progression, discovery of asymptomatic individuals, changes in virulence of the pathogen, and current levels of herd immunity. Community strategies may have severe and undesirable social and economic side effects. Modeling is the only available scientific approach to develop effective strategies that can minimize these unwanted side effects while retaining the effectiveness of the interventions. METHODS: We extended the agent-based model, SpatioTemporal Human Activity Model (STHAM), for simulating SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics. RESULTS: Here we present preliminary STHAM simulation results that reproduce the overall trends observed in the Wasatch Front (Utah, United States of America) for the general population. The results presented here clearly indicate that human activity patterns are important in predicting the rate of infection for different demographic groups in the population. CONCLUSIONS: Future work in pandemic simulations should use empirical human activity data for agent-based techniques.