Keep Moving Forward: Health Informatics and Information Management beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic.

OBJECTIVES: To identify gaps and challenges in health informatics and health information management during the COVID-19 pandemic. To describe solutions and offer recommendations that can address the identified gaps and challenges. METHODS: A literature review of relevant peer-reviewed and grey literature published from January 2020 to December 2020 was conducted to inform the paper. RESULTS: The literature revealed several themes regarding health information management and health informatics challenges and gaps: information systems and information technology infrastructure; data collection, quality, and standardization; and information governance and use. These challenges and gaps were often driven by public policy and funding constraints. CONCLUSIONS: COVID-19 exposed complexities related to responding to a world-wide, fast moving, quickly spreading novel virus. Longstanding gaps and ongoing challenges in the local, national, and global health and public health information systems and data infrastructure must be addressed before we are faced with another global pandemic.

Estimating the Effectiveness of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions on COVID-19 Control in Korea.

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has posed significant global public health challenges and created a substantial economic burden. Korea has experienced an extensive outbreak, which was linked to a religion-related super-spreading event. However, the implementation of various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including social distancing, spring semester postponing, and extensive testing and contact tracing controlled the epidemic. Herein, we estimated the effectiveness of each NPI using a simulation model. METHODS: A compartment model with a susceptible-exposed-infectious-quarantined-hospitalized structure was employed. Using the Monte-Carlo-Markov-Chain algorithm with Gibbs' sampling method, we estimated the time-varying effective contact rate to calibrate the model with the reported daily new confirmed cases from February 12th to March 31st (7 weeks). Moreover, we conducted scenario analyses by adjusting the parameters to estimate the effectiveness of NPI. RESULTS: Relaxed social distancing among adults would have increased the number of cases 27.4-fold until the end of March. Spring semester non-postponement would have increased the number of cases 1.7-fold among individuals aged 0-19, while lower quarantine and detection rates would have increased the number of cases 1.4-fold. CONCLUSION: Among the three NPI measures, social distancing in adults showed the highest effectiveness. The substantial effect of social distancing should be considered when preparing for the 2nd wave of COVID-19.

Balancing health privacy, health information exchange, and research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 infection poses serious challenges to the healthcare system that are being addressed through the creation of new unique and advanced systems of care with disjointed care processes (eg, telehealth screening, drive-through specimen collection, remote testing, telehealth management). However, our current regulations on the flows of information for clinical care and research are antiquated and often conflict at the state and federal levels. We discuss proposed changes to privacy regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act designed to let health information seamlessly and frictionlessly flow among the health entities that need to collaborate on treatment of patients and, also, allow it to flow to researchers trying to understand how to limit its impacts.