Summary
Objectives: Summarize excellent current research published in 2015 in the field of Public Health
and Epidemiology Informatics.
Methods: The complete 2015 literature concerning public health and epidemiology informatics
has been searched in PubMed and Web of Science, and the returned references were reviewed
by the two section editors to select 14 candidate best papers. These papers were then
peer-reviewed by external reviewers to allow the editorial team an enlightened selection
of the best papers.
Results: Among the 1,272 references retrieved from PubMed and Web of Science, three were
finally selected as best papers. The first one presents a language agnostic approach
for epidemic event detection in news articles. The second paper describes a system
using big health data gathered by a statewide system to forecast emergency department
visits. The last paper proposes a rather original approach that uses machine learning
to solve the old issue of outbreak detection and prediction.
Conclusions: The increasing availability of data, now directly from health systems, will probably
lead to a boom in public health surveillance systems and in large-scale epidemiologic
studies.
Keywords
Public health - epidemiology - medical informatics - International Medical Informatics
Association - health information systems
