Science and knowledge management: A challenge for the Cuban public health
Keywords:
COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, World Health Organization, WHO, science, knowledge management, public health, Cuba.Abstract
Since 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic, humanity has endured a global impact, and in response, the scientific community has been forced to produce knowledge at an accelerated pace. The WHO has become a global catalyst for this unprecedented effort. At the Pedro Kourí Tropical Medicine Institute, we have compiled a compendium of knowledge disseminated from 2020 to June 2022 in 217 internal updates, addressing 933 topics, all selected from 713 documents generated by the WHO. The magnitude of this condensed information was assessed in various dimensions. This led to a conception of the institutional development in knowledge management, of great interest to the Cuban health system, shared in that publication. During this period the WHO has provided information on the behavior of the virus, control strategies, diagnosis, sequencing, clinical management, treatment, and vaccine development, covering the full breadth of the outbreak, including various collaborative platforms. Upon completion of this task, the knowledge made globally available at its genesis and was objectified, thanks to a perfect storm that combined previous science and expertise, international collaboration, significant investment in research, and international, national, and private organizations. It also demonstrated the difficulty of assimilating the explosion of knowledge that occurred, an expression of contemporary science and a generator of knowledge management, the only possible response to its own exponential growth and the rapid transformation of its paradigms, due to the possibilities opened up by ICTs, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. In this context, we appreciate, from our perspective and by analogy with studies in Latin America, how the most basic tools of the new branch were used. On the horizon, these insights will be crucial for the health sector, but we are not making progress towards their meeting point. The longer we delay, the more difficult and distant that moment will be.
Today we need to promote actions to harness all these tools, open ourselves to their unlimited possibilities for humanity, and apply them to our health system.
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