* By Dr. Denise Basow
The new coronavirus proliferated around the world at the speed of light, spurring an explosion of new medical information in the last 18 months. Front-line care teams were desperate to find newer guidelines for dealing with the flow of patients passing through their emergency departments, but they were often also faced with inaccurate information that could harm their patients.
Likewise, patients struggled to understand which sources of information they could trust so they could protect themselves and their loved ones.
WHO has identified this information deluge, or “information pandemic”, as a major problem for global health.
According to the WHO, the definition of an information pandemic is “the excess of information, including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during an outbreak of a disease, which can cause confusion and risk behaviors that can harm the health, in addition to generating distrust in health authorities, hampering the response to the public”.
Consider that, on January 31, 2020, 50 studies on coronavirus in 20 days — remarkable progress. Currently, there are more than 150,000 studies on the coronavirus, with some estimates as high as 400,000 if we include preprinted journals and other undefined literature.
It is critical that someone make sense of all this information if it is to be useful in treating patients, as there is a significant margin for error when considering the immense pressure to do it as quickly as possible to save lives.
While much of my career has been focused on putting the latest evidence-based information in the hands of the medical community to promote better care everywhere, let's not forget that patients are an extremely important part of the healthcare team.
They also need the right information—and that information must align with the evidence your care teams are using to make treatment decisions.
Fighting misinformation
Fortunately, there is a clear path to combat misinformation – which can lead to an information pandemic – and it is essential that the health community understand and accept it now, to mitigate future occurrences:
– Listen to communities—doctors and patients—to learn their specific questions and concerns.
– Put the facts in these communities' hands so they can accurately assess the risk, especially around new vaccines to fight COVID-19.
– Promote a broad understanding of the Internet's ability to produce good and bad information to build resilience to misinformation.
– Provide tools that empower communities to act, such as instructions on how to distinguish fact from fiction and anything undefined.
Around the world, everyone, from government and public health officials to healthcare professionals, community leaders and patients, needs help determining when it is appropriate to act (or not to act) based on scientific evidence.
Everyone should have access to evidence-based information that informs their decisions, and technology should help facilitate, not impede, that access.
We can and must learn from the COVID-19 information pandemic to improve the future public health response.
* Dr. Denise Basow, CEO of Clinical Effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer, Health
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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