When Past Isn’t a Prologue: Adapting Informatics Practice During a Pandemic

Kannampallil, Thomas G; Foraker, Randi E; Lai, Albert M; Woeltje, Keith F; Payne, Philip R O

Data and information technology are key to every aspect of our response to the current COVID-19 pandemic—from how we diagnose patients and deliver care, to the development of predictive models of disease spread, to the management of personnel and equipment. The increasing engagement of informaticians at the forefront of these efforts has been a fundamental shift: from an academic to an operational role. However, the past history of informatics as a scientific domain and an area of applied practice provides little guidance or prologue for the incredible challenges that we are now tasked with performing. Building upon our recent experiences, we present four critical lessons-learned that have helped shape our scalable, data-driven response to COVID-19. We describe each of these lessons within the context of specific solutions and strategies we applied in addressing the challenges that we faced.