Working Group Webinar Library

Digital health is rapidly expanding due to surging healthcare costs, deteriorating health outcomes, and the growing prevalence and accessibility of mobile health and wearable technologies. Recent technological advancements make it possible to closely and continuously monitor individuals using multiple measurement modalities in real time.

The easy availability of a vast repository of user-generated health information on video sharing social media platforms, such as YouTube, offers an effective way to deliver medical information that may be more understandable for the public, with the potential to improve health literacy, patient-physician interactions, self-care and health outcomes.

In this session, Emma Rourke, Director of Health Analysis and Pandemic Insights at ONS, outlines how the organization leveraged large-scale linked administrative data assets alongside ambitious survey data collection, including wide scale biological sampling, to offer unique evidence and insights that have informed the UK's pandemic response. Emma will detail how ONS stood-up the gold-standard longitudinal Coronavirus Infection Survey (CIS) in April 2020, offering trusted regular estimates of Covid-19 infection and immunity across all four nations of the UK.

The widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has enabled the use of clinical data for clinical research and practice. Since a significant portion of relevant patient information is embedded in clinical narratives, natural language processing (NLP) techniques such as information extraction have become critical for using EHRs in clinical research. Meanwhile, encoding entire EHR data in a patient representation has shown promising results in predictive modeling, and could help clinical decision making and facilitate translational research. This talk will feature clinical NLP methodologies and applications, and discuss why learning better representations from EHRs is crucial for clinical and translational research.

Dr. Ashish Joshi discussed efforts of the Global Health Informatics working group to engage learners in a variety of collaborative informatics activities, shared about students engaged in his own funded global health informatics projects, and presented opportunities for the Education working group to collaborate on efforts to enhance our shared knowledge of global health informatics education.