Online Journal of Public Health Informatics

Addressing the opioid epidemic requires timely insights into population-level factors, such as trends in prevalence of legal and illegal substances, overdoses, and deaths.

Considerable use of mobile health (mHealth) interventions has been seen, and these interventions have beneficial effects on health and health service delivery processes, especially in resource-limited settings. Various functionalities of mobile phones offer a range of opportunities for mHealth interventions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) applied to medicine offers immense promise, in addition to safety and regulatory concerns. Traditional AI produces a core algorithm result, typically without a measure of statistical confidence or an explanation of its biological-theoretical basis. Efforts are underway to develop explainable AI (XAI) algorithms that not only produce a result but also an explanation to support that result. Here we present a framework for classifying XAI algorithms applied to clinical medicine: An algorithm’s clinical scope is defined by whether the core algorithm output leads to observations (eg, tests, imaging, clinical evaluation), interventions (eg, procedures, medications), diagnoses, and prognostication. Explanations are classified by whether they provide empiric statistical information, association with a historical population or populations, or association with an established disease mechanism or mechanisms. XAI implementations can be classified based on whether algorithm training and validation took into account the actions of health care providers in response to the insights and explanations provided or whether training was performed using only the core algorithm output as the end point. Finally, communication modalities used to convey an XAI explanation can be used to classify algorithms and may affect clinical outcomes. This framework can be used when designing, evaluating, and comparing XAI algorithms applied to medicine.

Founded in 2009, the Online Journal of Public Health Informatics (OJPHI) strives to provide an unparalleled experience as the platform of choice to advance public and population health informatics. As a premier peer-reviewed journal in this field, OJPHI’s mission is to serve as an advocate for the discipline through the dissemination of public health informatics research results and best practices among practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and educators. However, in the current environment, running an independent open access journal has not been without challenges. Judging from the low geographic spread of our current stakeholders, the overreliance on a small volunteer management staff, the limited scope of topics published by the journal, and the long article turnaround time, it is obvious that OJPHI requires a change in direction in order to fully achieve its mission. Fortunately, our new publisher JMIR Publications is the leading brand in this field, with a portfolio of top peer-reviewed journals covering innovation, technology, digital medicine and health services research in the internet age. Under the leadership of JMIR Publications, OJPHI plans to expand its scope to include new topics such as precision public health informatics, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in public health research and practice, and infodemiology in public health informatics.