Analysis and Evaluation of Covid-19 Tools for Health Professionals: Challenges and Opportunities

The multidisciplinary nature of the work required for research in the Covid-19 pandemic has created new challenges for health professionals in the battle against the virus. They need to be equipped with novel tools and resources ---that have emerged during the pandemic--- to gain access to breakthrough findings, know the latest developments, and to address their specific needs for rapid data acquisition, analysis, evaluation, and reporting. Because of the complex nature of the virus, the healthcare systems worldwide are severely impacted as the treatment and the vaccine for Covid-19 disease are not yet discovered. This leads to frequent changes in regulations and policies by governments and international organizations. Our analysis suggests that given the abundance of information sources, finding the most suitable tool for a given task is one of such challenges. But health professionals and policymakers need access to the most relevant, reliable, trusted, and latest information and tools that can be used in their day-to-day tasks of Covid-19 research and analysis. In this article, we present our analysis of various novel and important tools that have been specifically developed during the Covid-19 pandemic and that can be used by the health professionals community to help in advancing their analysis and research. These tools comprise of search engines, information repositories for literature and clinical trials, data sources, dashboards, and forecasting models. We present list of the minimally essential tools to serve a multitude of purposes, from hundreds of those developed since the beginning of the pandemic. A critical analysis is provided for the selected tools based on 17 parameters that can be useful for researchers and analysts for their evaluations. These parameters make up our evaluation framework and have not been used previously for analysis and evaluation. Hence, knowledge of the tools will not only increase the productivity but will also allow to explore new dimensions for using existing tools with more control, better management, and greater outcome of their research. In addition, the parameters used in our framework can be applied for future evaluations of similar tools and health professionals can adapt them for evaluation of other tools not covered in this analysis..

Medienart:	Preprint

Erscheinungsjahr:	2020
Erschienen:	2020

Enthalten in:	Preprints.org - (2020) vom: 12. Nov. Zur Gesamtaufnahme - year:2020

Sprache:	Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:	Mukhtar, Hamid [VerfasserIn] Ahmad, Hafiz [VerfasserIn] Khan, Muhammad [VerfasserIn] Ullah, Nasim [VerfasserIn]

Links:	Volltext [lizenzpflichtig] Volltext [kostenfrei]

Themen:	500 Life Sciences

doi:	10.20944/preprints202010.0485.v1

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PPN (Katalog-ID):	preprintsorg019184735