About the Collection:

This collection highlights the breadth and quality of digital health research covered in the JMIR portfolio. Many of the articles you see are the products of Open Science best practices including open peer review of preprints and publication of a protocol prior to results - we greatly appreciate the work our reviewers do in maintaining the high standard required for truly open and constructive feedback. 

Although we publish across all fields of digital health featured topics include:

• mHealth & uHealth
• Mental Health
• Medical Informatics
• Public Health & Surveillance
• Serious Games

The New Digital Normal in Health and Medicine #newdigitalnormal 

A new standing JMIR theme issue: The Pandemic and Lockdowns has led to paradigm changes in health care - are the changes here to stay? 

JMIR Publications is issuing a call for papers to address key issues in the evolution of a new digital normal in health and medicine. In this open call for theme issue papers, JMIR Publications encourages authors to submit their work to our family of journals investigating evidence for paradigm changes in digital health care and public health induced by the pandemic and pandemic-related responses, such as lockdowns.

Digital health was formerly known by other names: “cybermedicine” in the late 1990s and “electronic health” or “eHealth” in the early 2000s, and new monikers have continued to be created in the years since. In parallel to the slow evolution of digital health, criticisms of the slow adoption of the “digital” aspect of health and medical education persisted—until 2020. 

Then, the global COVID pandemic that began in 2020 extraordinarily disrupted established routines, services, supply chains, and life in general, across all sectors, including health, and it accelerated the digital transformation in all areas of life, including medicine and health care. The development and adoption of all forms of digital health care services, including but not limited to telemedicine, home monitoring, and remote medical education, skyrocketed practically overnight—not out of choice, but out of necessity. In addition, the pandemic and lockdowns fueled an unprecedented level of innovation and rethinking of antiquated processes across numerous sectors. 

Digitization of services across sectors can influence the health and well-being of societies in previously unforeseen ways, and scholars will investigate the catalytic role of the pandemic for decades to come. The New Digital Normal in Health special theme issue across JMIR Publications’ journals will provide a home for studies that shed light on this line of research, and the accompanying social media campaign with the hashtag #newdigitalnormal will highlight news and research related to that topic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the internet and services reliant on internet access became lifelines to connect people together, in an attempt to sustain personal and family relationships, work functions in virtual workplaces, and access to essential services (eg, health care, education, and government or legal services). Working, studying, and socializing from home or from a distance became the new normal, and this will continue to be the case in many areas. With rapid innovation and digitization, particularly in health care, comes the potential for rapidly widening health and social disparities, as the digital divide between those who can and cannot access remote essential services grows and endangers the ideals of global health and social systems. New ethical, legal, and social issues not previously considered have also arisen. Furthermore, evaluation of innovations remains necessary to ensure safe care delivery that can rapidly recognize and mitigate or adapt to avoid unintended negative consequences. Digital health care should continue to strive to be not only patient-centered, timely, and efficient, but also safe, effective, and equitable, as advocated by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. 

Future scholarly work may divide the paradigm changes in digital health care into pre- and post-COVID eras, and the generation that grows up in the post-COVID world (Generation Alpha) will have a different experience in all areas of life, much as there is a generation that grew up before the internet that had a different experience than the generation that came after (ie, pre– and post–World Wide Web). The development, socialization, and overall health and well-being of children, adolescents, and young adults during world-changing pandemic times may be forever altered as a result of the societal and systemic changes forced by COVID-19 and global responses.

But how sustainable are these innovations and shifts in services and workflows? What will be deemed successful? What are the unanticipated yet potentially beneficial (or harmful) consequences? How will societies and systems respond to new challenges in an ethical and equitable manner? How the pandemic has changed paradigms in health care, education, and business will be the subject of scholarly investigation for years, or even decades, to come.

JMIR Publications is issuing a standing call for papers to address these issues. We are interested in original research, systematic reviews, research letters, viewpoints, and other JMIR article types that explore these issues. 

Submissions may include but are not limited to the following topics: 

• Before-after comparisons of telemedicine usage and adoption of other digital health services 

• Impact of changes in digital health care delivery on health outcomes

• Evaluation of digital technologies, including but not limited to utilization and adoption rates

• Assessments of sustainability of digital technologies, with consideration of those that have permanently changed health care delivery

• Cost-benefit analyses of the new digital normal 

• Examination of challenges and unintended consequences of tech-driven health care delivery

• Assessments of remote education and training of virtual clinicians and health professionals and their long-term impacts 

• Development of initiatives and programs that enrich a diverse and inclusive pipeline of digital health and informatics professionals to address new pandemic-induced public health, medical, and scientific issues

• Determination of the dynamics and impact of the tsunami of misinformation (infodemic) on societies, medicine, and science

• Investigations of health disparities and inequities in digital services and technologies

• Novel digital services and technologies for under-resourced or historically marginalized communities

• Consequences of missed prevention and treatment encounters during the pandemic and how sustainable digital technologies are delivered to address disruptions in services 

• New scientific methodologies, research conduct, and research ethics resulting from pandemic regulations and lockdowns

Submissions not reviewed or accepted for publication in this JMIR theme issue may be offered cascading peer review or transfer to other JMIR journals, according to standard JMIR Publications policies. 

Register your intent to submit

ChatGPT, Generative Language Models and Generative AI in Medical Education

JMIR Medical Education, a leading journal with emphasis on digital approaches to medical education, is inviting submissions on the use of generative language models and generative artificial intelligence (AI) in medical education. Generative AI can be used to create new content, including text, computer code, images, simulations, and videos, and is expected to fundamentally disrupt how content is produced.

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a generative language model tool launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022, enabling the public to converse with a machine on a broad range of topics. Since its release, ChatGPT has stimulated widespread conversation and momentum across various fields, including medicine. Studies have also shown preliminary evidence that ChatGPT has promising applications across the clinical workflow [1]. In medical education, a recent study [2] found that ChatGPT was able to pass the United States Medical Licensing Examination (Step 1 and Step 2), performing at a level comparable to a third-year medical student. Moreover, ChatGPT and similar generative AI have specific applications within medical education, including clinical vignette generation [1,3] and communications training with AI virtual patients [4]; however, they also pose a number of challenges that universities need to carefully address [5].

Inspired by the recent success of ChatGPT, as well as its significant impact on academia and medical training and education, JMIR Medical Education announces a new theme issue, inviting original research studies, case studies, tutorials, and viewpoint articles on the use of generative language models and generative AI in medical education [6]. Beyond ChatGPT, exploration and evaluation of other powerful language models such as Google’s “Language Model for Dialogue Applications” (LaMDA/BERT) are also in scope, as are applications using generative AI to generate medical education assets such as images (eg, with Dall-E).

Submissions are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• The potential of generative language models and generative AI for medical education, including their use in teaching and learning for clinical decision-making and patient care

• Role of generative language models and AI in enhancing the quality of medical education, including the use of simulations, virtual patients, and practice boards or medical qualification questions, and other forms of digital learning resources

• Use of generative language models for automated feedback or evaluation of performance or competency in medical education

• The development and evaluation of virtual patients generated by generative language models

• Assessment of the quality of information and simulations generated by generative language models, as well as strategies for improving the quality through proper prompting and other approaches

• Training medical students and health care professionals on AI, specifically on generative language models, including the development of curricula and instructional materials

• Use of ChatGPT for patient and consumer education

• Training medical students and health care professionals on the ways their future patients will interact with generative language models and AI

• Ethical and legal issues related to the use of generative language models and AI in medical education, including issues related to data privacy, bias, and transparency.

• Academic integrity issues and policies describing how medical schools allow or disallow the use of generative language models

• Current trends in medical education related to generative AI, including perceptions, ideas, models, and pilots or use cases

• Viewpoints on the future of medical education in the age of ChatGPT

• Tutorials (eg, how-to articles) on incorporating generative language models or AI into medical education, which should also include at least preliminary evaluative information about the curricular innovation described in the tutorial

JMIR Medical Education welcomes submissions from researchers, educators, and practitioners in medicine, health care, computer science, and related fields. Submissions from a breadth of professionals at all career stages who are engaged in medical education are welcome for this theme issue. We encourage both empirical and theoretical submissions, including original research, systematic reviews, viewpoints, and tutorials. We also encourage submissions that address practical challenges and opportunities related to the use of generative language models and AI in medical education.

Prospective authors are encouraged to read “The Role of ChatGPT, Generative Language Models, and Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education: A Conversation With ChatGPT and a Call for Papers” [6].

We will not accept articles that are solely written by ChatGPT itself. Please refer to our emerging editorial policy regarding the use of ChatGPT in article ideation or manuscript preparation and specifically on how to disclose the use of generative tools in the manuscript. If original ChatGPT-generated text is used, it should be presented as a quote, textbox, or figure. In particular, we ask to keep the complete original ChatGPT transcripts used on file and submit them as Multimedia Appendices (or supplementary material).

All submissions will undergo a rigorous peer-review process, and accepted articles will be published as part of a special issue on generative language models and AI in medical education.

Submission deadline: July 31, 2023 (may be extended)

Authors are encouraged to submit study protocols or grant proposals to JMIR Research Protocols before data acquisition to pre-register the study (Registered Reports - subsequent acceptance in one of the JMIR journals is then guaranteed).

Submissions not reviewed or accepted for publication in this JMIR theme issue may be offered cascading peer review or transfer to other JMIR journals, according to standard JMIR Publications policies.

High-quality original research more focused on clinical applications than medical education (for example, training and evaluation of new models with clinical data/text or research articles) may be submitted or transferred to the Artificial Intelligence section of our flagship journal Journal of Medical Internet Research; highly technical papers may be transferred to or submitted to JMIR Medical Informatics or JMIR Biomedical Engineering. Selected papers also may be in scope for JMIR AI [7]. Papers related to the quality of ChatGPT advice and its impact for public health may also be in scope for JMIR Infodemiology; papers focussing on the impact on participatory medicine and the patient-doctor relationship are also in scope for the Journal of Participatory Medicine. Early-stage formative work that informs the design of future interventions or research is in scope for JMIR Formative Research.

For more information, please contact the guest editors of this special issue:

Guest Editors

Kaushik P Venkatesh, MBA, MPH

Harvard Medical School, Boston MA, USA

kaushik_venkatesh@hms.harvard.edu 

Maged N Kamel Boulos, MBBCh, MSc, PhD, FHEA, SMIEEE

Sun Yat-sen University, China

mnkboulos@ieee.org 

Acknowledgements

The original call for papers was drafted by ChatGPT, transcript is available in The Role of ChatGPT, Generative Language Models, and Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education: A Conversation With ChatGPT and a Call for Papers [6].

References

1. Rao A, Pang M, Kim J, Kamineni M, Lie W, Prasad AK, Landman A, Dreyer KJ, Succi MD. Assessing the Utility of ChatGPT Throughout the Entire Clinical Workflow. medRxiv. Preprint posted online 2023 Feb 26. doi: 10.1101/2023.02.21.23285886

2. Gilson A, Safranek CW, Huang T, Socrates V, Chi L, Taylor RA, Chartash D. How Does ChatGPT Perform on the United States Medical Licensing Examination? The Implications of Large Language Models for Medical Education and Knowledge Assessment. JMIR Med Educ 2023 Feb 8;9:e45312. doi: 10.2196/45312 PMID: 36753318 

3. Benoit JRA. ChatGPT for Clinical Vignette Generation, Revision, and Evaluation. medRxiv. Preprint posted online 2023 Feb 8. doi: 10.1101/2023.02.04.23285478

4. Shorey S, Ang E, Yap J, Ng ED, Lau ST, Chui CK. A Virtual Counseling Application Using Artificial Intelligence for Communication Skills Training in Nursing Education: Development Study. J Med Internet Res 2019 Oct 29;21(10):e14658. doi: 10.2196/14658 PMID: 31663857

5. Sinhaliz S, Burd L, Du Preez J. How ChatGPT Could Revolutionize Academia - The AI Chatbot Could Enhance Learning, But Also Creates Some Challenges. IEEE Spectrum. 2023 Feb 22. https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-chatgpt-could-revolutionize-academia

6. Eysenbach G. The Role of ChatGPT, Generative Language Models, and Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education: A Conversation With ChatGPT and a Call for Papers. JMIR Med Educ 2023;9:e46885. doi: 10.2196/46885 PMID: 36863937

7. El Emam K, Malin B. Introducing JMIR AI. JMIR AI 2022;1(1):e42046. doi: 10.2196/42046