Online Journal of Public Health Informatics

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.

With the increasing use of social media, platforms like Twitter (X) have become popular channels for disseminating health information. In Saudi Arabia, Twitter (X) is widely used, making it an effective tool for health awareness. However, the accuracy of nutrition-related content on social media is often questioned.

TikTok became an increasingly popular platform for mental health discussions during a major global stressor (COVID-19 pandemic). On TikTok, content assumed to promote user engagement is delivered in a hyper-individually-curated manner through a proprietary algorithm. Mental health providers have raised concerns about TikTok's potential role in promoting inaccurate self-diagnoses, pathologizing normal behaviors, and fostering new-onset symptoms after exposure to illness-related content, such as tic-like movements linked to Conversion or Factitious Disorders. The accuracy of PTSD-related content with respect to conveying symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment deserves further investigation.

This viewpoint highlights the critical need for proactive and strategic integration of digital health tools into heat-health action plans (HHAPs) across Europe. Drawing insights from the digital health surge during the COVID-19 pandemic and recent heat-related health impacts, we identify response gaps and suggest specific strategies to strengthen current plans. Key recommendations include leveraging mobile health communication, expanding telemedicine usage, adopting wearable health monitoring devices, and utilizing advanced data analytics to improve responsiveness and equity. This perspective aims to guide policymakers, health authorities, and healthcare providers in systematically enhancing heat-health preparedness through digital health innovation.

Tailoring intervention content, such as those designed to improve physical activity (PA) behaviour, can enhance effectiveness. Previous Bayesian network research showed that it might be relevant to tailor PA interventions based on demographic factors such as gender, revealing differences in determinants' roles between subpopulations. In order to optimise tailoring, one needs to understand the differences between subpopulations based on different other characteristics. Building on this, the current study examines age, education level and PA impairment as key moderators, as these factors might influence PA engagement and intervention responsiveness. Older adults, for example, rely more on habitual behaviour, lower-educated individuals may face challenges due to lower health literacy and socio-economic inequalities, and individuals with PA impairment, defined as functional impairments restricting PA, may face unique barriers to PA. Understanding differences based on these factors is crucial for optimising interventions and ensuring effectiveness across diverse populations.

Threats to data integrity have always existed in online human subjects research, but it appears these threats have become more common and more advanced in recent years. Researchers have proposed various techniques to address satisficers, repeat participants, bots, and fraudulent participants, yet no synthesis of this literature has been conducted.

Nigeria has made significant investments in client-level electronic health systems, including the Nigeria Medical Record System (NMRS) and the National Data Repository (NDR), with funding from the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) through the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC). A biometric system was used across the U.S. CDC supported program in Nigeria to consistently track and monitor service uptake by People Living with HIV (PLHIV) during this period. The system was used to conduct deduplication analysis with the goal to prevent double counting and improve data integrity across all the U.S. CDC supported treatment sites (health facilities and community sites).

Neonatal disease and its outcomes are important indicators for responsive health care system and encompasses the effect of socio-economic and environmental factors on new-borns and mothers. Ethiopia is working to achieve the SDG target for the reduction of 12 or less per 1000 birth by 2030 and 21 per 1000 livebirths by 2025 as part of second Ethiopian Health Sector Transformation Plan.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to offer valuable insights into crisis management and risk communication, particularly through retrospective analyses that allow a more comprehensive understanding. Emotional responses played a crucial role in shaping how individuals processed information and built trust in different objects in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of remote consultations across healthcare, requiring rapid adjustments in service delivery. Consequently, there is an urgent need to understand the impact of remote consultations on health pathways. This viewpoint article explores key challenges in data sources in England that hinder research on the impact of remote consultations on health outcomes. Based on our experience conducting research in this topic, we present variations in observational study findings and their validity, considering differences in population characteristics and data sources. We provide recommendations to enhance data quality for future research, including improvements in data recording platforms and strengthened structures for linking primary and secondary care electronic health records.

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals are at heightened risk for substance use and sexually transmitted infections than their non-SGM peers. Collecting mobile phone usage data passively may open new opportunities for personalizing interventions, as behavioral risks could be identified without user input.