Collaborations between Public Health and Computer Science: A Path Worth Pursuing

Abstract

Collaboration between public health and computer science shows much promise. The history of the two disciplines is discussed. Examples of recent efforts at collaboration are described to give a flavor of where this path may be going. These studies ranged from some showing effectiveness to others demonstrating the infancy of the collaboration at this point in time. Technology and computer science offer public health many new technological advances by making further use of the internet, enhancements in public health informatics, using computer science to accomplish clinical work gathered by physicians to name a few examples. Still other computer science research concentrations such as animation and virtual reality deserve further exploration. Pursuing this path is certainly worth taking to further advance knowledge and the mission of public health primarily through collaborative efforts taken by individuals/teams in the two disciplines. A collaboration with computer science will help bring public health to meet the 21 st century both in terms of challenges and technology.

Crime, inequality and public health: a survey of emerging trends in urban data science

“…Public health is an inherently interdisciplinary field, whose key focus, preventing disease and promoting health, largely benefits from the contribution of different scholarly expertise, ranging from medicine to the social sciences, psychology and economics (Gavens et al, 2018 ). The past decades have seen an ever-increasing adoption of computational and digital methods in the research on public health, and many have been advocating for increasingly closer collaboration between computer scientists and public health scholars (Epstein, 2013 ).…”

The Case for Computational Health Science

“…There have been and continue to be many instances of collaborations across the health and computing sciences [ 19 ]. However, in most cases, these are examples of what may be regarded as multidisciplinary activities, where one group may take advantage of the expertise of another, but with only limited, if any, engagement in that other group’s expertise and research agenda [ 12 ].…”