Guest Editorial: Data Analytics for Public Health Care

The papers in this special section focus on data analytics for public health care. Growing and intensive attention for the use of data analytics in healthcare due to its proven benefits to gain insights on the macro and micro depths to support decisionmaking at the patient, clinical, bench side and business levels. Health data analytics contributed to the improvements to patient care, faster and more accurate diagnoses, preventive measures, more personalized treatment, narrow the gap between bedside and bench side and provide more informed decision-making. However, the recent pandemic of COVID-19 draw the world attention to need to extend the power of data analytics beyond the legacy data channels including Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Patient Portals. Data analytics can assist population health management in improving patient outcomes, enhancing care management, and address social determinants of health. As the population health analytics continues to grow in the healthcare space, healthcare systems must be able to gather data from multiple sources, apply variety of data analytics (e.g., Descriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics Prescriptive Analytics), and manage the provide insights for the population.