Prologue

Context (archaeology)

Informatics

Engineering

Philosophy

Health care

Archaeology

Computer science

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Paradigm shift

Health informatics

Political science

Epistemology

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Data science

Medicine

Knowledge management

Pandemic

Disease

Engineering ethics

Pathology

History

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

Data and information technology are key to every aspect of our response to the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic—including the diagnosis of patients and delivery of care, the development of predictive models of disease spread, and 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 on our recent experiences, we present 4 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.

When past is not a prologue: Adapting informatics practice during a pandemic