Experts’ Opinions on the Sustainable Use of Digital Health Tools for Effective Future Pandemic Preparedness and Response: Questionnaire Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<sec> <title>BACKGROUND</title> The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the potential role of digital health tools in enhancing pandemic preparedness and response. These tools became essential, supporting not only health care delivery but also decision-making, communication, case identification, contact tracing, surveillance, vaccination rollout, and intervention evaluation. The interest in applying digital health tools to pandemic preparedness and response motivated conversations about digital epidemiology—a field of study that aims to provide insight into health and disease determinants by leveraging diverse digital data sources. In a globalized world, effective preparedness and response to pandemics require coordinated global action. </sec> <sec> <title>OBJECTIVE</title> This study investigates experts’ opinions on strategies for improving global health security through the effective use of digital epidemiology, considering the current landscape of digital determinants of health. </sec> <sec> <title>METHODS</title> Epidemiologists, public health specialists, data scientists, and professionals with expertise in various components of digital health were recruited through convenience and snowball sampling methods. Their opinions were elicited using an electronic questionnaire developed by the authors in Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap; Vanderbilt University). To ensure a global perspective, participants were recruited from Africa, North America, Oceania, and Europe. Thematic analysis and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis framework were used to analyze participants’ responses. </sec> <sec> <title>RESULTS</title> Most participants were familiar with the concept of digital epidemiology and expressed positive sentiments about its potential in strengthening global health security. Privacy and security, along with ethical and legal considerations, were ranked by most experts as high priority areas that decision-makers and implementers must consider to ensure sustainable integration of digital epidemiology tools in future pandemic preparedness and response. A SWOT analysis of participants’ views on the promise of digital epidemiology revealed fewer strengths and more weaknesses compared to other components of the analysis framework. </sec> <sec> <title>CONCLUSIONS</title> This study highlights the growing recognition of digital epidemiology as a critical tool for enhancing global health security, particularly using nontraditional data sources and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. The study affirms the need for a globally coordinated approach to governance, regulation, and investment in digital health infrastructure to ensure the responsible and effective application of digital innovations in epidemiological practice. </sec>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".