Low-to-Middle-Income Country (LMIC) National and Regional Responses during Epidemic Situations and COVID-19: The Role of Informatics in Prevention, Preparation, Control, and Management

The panel members will chronicle the unique informatics needs, challenges, and approaches to health care demands during a pandemic, illustrated through the initial and current responses to the COVID-19 epidemic, in resource-constrained environments. The ability to identify and address challenges and difficult clinical situations with bioinformatics is critical in the effective, rapid delivery of public health and clinical responses during pandemic conditions. Informatic tools need to support important functions, such as contact tracing, to limit the spread of new cases and trials of new diagnostic/therapeutic approaches. We will describe and compare the unique informatics needs, challenges, and solutions, such as analytics and clinical decision support, that have been developed and deployed during epidemic situations in LMIC.