Online Journal of Public Health Informatics

Public health data integration and automation systems are crucial for effective healthcare delivery and public health surveillance. However, the factors associated with hospitals' adoption and successful implementation remain inadequately explored.

COVID-19 forecasting models have been used to inform decision making around resource allocation and intervention decisions e.g., hospital beds or stay-at-home orders. State-of-the-art forecasting models often use multimodal data such as mobility or socio-demographic data to enhance COVID-19 case prediction models. Nevertheless, related work has revealed under-reporting bias in COVID-19 cases as well as sampling bias in mobility data for certain minority racial and ethnic groups, which affects the fairness of the COVID-19 predictions among racial and ethnic groups.

Loneliness is a dynamic phenomenon that can be investigated using social media and web data.

Considering the rapid digital transformation, older adults are increasingly relying on online health information seeking (OHIS) to support healthy aging. However, disparities in their digital competence levels—the ability to effectively use digital tools—and health literacy—the ability to access, understand, appraise, and apply health information—may influence engagement in OHIS.

The Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP), a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) program established in 1990, is an injury and poisoning sentinel surveillance system that collects and analyzes data on injuries to individuals who are seen at the emergency departments of numerous pediatric and general hospitals in Canada. Since its inception, the program has collected over 4 million records. The program’s surveillance activities have contributed substantially to evidence-based decision-making to reduce injuries, support research and establish preventive safeguards to protect the health and safety of Canadians. Patients presenting at participating hospitals are asked to complete a data collection form capturing the causes and circumstances contributing to the injury or poisoning event. Using this text, hospital and program staff have traditionally coded numerous surveillance variable codes manually for subsequent analysis within e-CHIRPP, the program’s purpose-built analytical application on the Canadian Network for Public Health Intelligence (CNPHI) public health informatics platform. Manual coding of this complex data is administratively burdensome and results in a significant time-lag in the availability of important surveillance findings.

Digital-based health interventions (DHIs), defined as health services delivered electronically, have demonstrated effectiveness in promoting health outcomes. However, DHIs often suffer from low user retention, a challenge attributed to limited attention to socio-cultural determinants and insufficient user engagement strategies. This paper explores participatory animation (PA), a collaborative methodology that engages community partners in co-creating animated content, as a strategy to improve DHI retention and effectiveness. Drawing from existing literature, this viewpoint examines the theoretical foundations and practical affordances of PA for enhancing digital health interventions. We describe PA as a multi-step production process that integrates participant-driven oral and visual design contributions into multimedia outputs for use in DHIs. Here, PA shows promise in producing engaging and culturally resonant content, with potential to improve intervention uptake and sustain user engagement. Despite these affordances, PA remains underutilized in health research. Given the growing urgency to develop effective, equitable DHIs, participatory animation offers a novel, community-informed approach for enhancing both design and implementation. This paper positions PA as a methodological frontier for digital health intervention science.

The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted telehealth adoption among clinical nutritionists globally. However, there is a research gap in Saudi Arabia concerning telehealth's prevalence and effectiveness in dietetics practice.

College years represent a pivotal phase as students transition into adulthood, a period marked by heightened vulnerability to mental health challenges. Beyond the high prevalence of common mental health issues, a large treatment gap (driven by both supply-side and demand-side factors) exacerbates the overall burden. Furthermore, students in higher education frequently experience psychological distress and subthreshold symptoms that impair well-being and daily functioning. Globally, technology-based mental health solutions have emerged as an important strategy to address unmet needs, with a growing evidence base across populations. Research has increasingly focused on examining digital mental health interventions for college students. Against this backdrop, we examine the challenges within India’s large higher education system—which serves approximately 43 million students—and the expanding role of technology in this sector. We explore the potential for leveraging technology-based solutions to enhance student mental health initiatives within higher education institutions, considering relevant policies and guidelines that provide an impetus to these efforts. We reflect upon challenges and opportunities for implementing digital mental health interventions in Indian higher education, and propose strategic actions at institutional and governmental levels. Key considerations include data governance, safety, transparency, positioning of digital initiatives relative to in-person care, safeguards for content quality, provision of interventions at varying intensities, and recommendations for policy, governmental support, and research to optimize the use of technology for student mental health in institutes of higher education in India.

This research letter describes substance use disparities among online, help-seeking, sexual and gender minoritized people in San Francisco. Our findings emphasize the importance of strengthening public health practice by leveraging digital and online methods to reach communities.

Depression and anxiety affect millions worldwide; yet, many people face barriers to timely and effective mental health care, underscoring the need for scalable, high-quality interventions.

Disaster medicine education increasingly emphasizes situational awareness and a proactive disaster mindset as crucial competencies for effective response. Situational awareness involves comprehending the disaster environment to make informed decisions under pressure, while a disaster mindset encompasses psychological resilience and effective functioning amidst chaos. Integrating technologies into simulation training allows experiential learning that bridges these theoretical concepts with practical application.

Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is the most common cause of vaginal discharge in people of childbearing age in the United States. More information about what patients do and do not like about the most common BV products and the extent to which they reduce BV symptoms is important for understanding patients’ health and the current treatment landscape for BV.