The IHI Rochester Report 2022 on Healthcare Informatics Research: Resuming After the CoViD-19

Abstract

AbstractIn 2020, the pandemic spread worldwide in an unexpected way and suddenly modified many life issues, including social habits, social relationships, teaching modalities, and more. Such changes were also observable in many different healthcare and medical contexts. Moreover, the pandemic acted as a stress test for many research endeavors, and revealed some limitations, especially in contexts where research results had an immediate impact on the social and healthcare habits of millions of people. As a result, the research community is called to perform a deep analysis of the steps already taken, and to re-think steps for the near and far future to capitalize on the lessons learned due to the pandemic. In this direction, on June 09th–11th, 2022, a group of twelve healthcare informatics researchers met in Rochester, MN, USA. This meeting was initiated by the Institute for Healthcare Informatics—, and hosted by the Mayo Clinic. The goal of the meeting was to discuss and propose a research agenda for biomedical and health informatics for the next decade, in light of the changes and the lessons learned from the pandemic. This article reports the main topics discussed and the conclusions reached. The intended readers of this paper, besides the biomedical and health informatics research community, are all those stakeholders in academia, industry, and government, who could benefit from the new research findings in biomedical and health informatics research. Indeed, research directions and social and policy implications are the main focus of the research agenda we propose, according to three levels: the care of individuals, the healthcare system view, and the population view.