Developing a diverse informatics workforce broadens the research agenda and ensures the growth of innovative solutions that enable equity-centered care. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) established the AMIA First Look Program in 2017 to address workforce disparities among women, including those from marginalized communities. The program exposes women to informatics, furnishes mentors, and provides career resources. In 4 years, the program has introduced 87 undergraduate women, 41% members of marginalized communities, to informatics. Participants from the 2019 and 2020 cohorts reported interest in pursuing a career in informatics increased from 57% to 86% after participation, and 86% of both years' attendees responded that they would recommend the program to others. A June 2021 LinkedIn profile review found 50% of participants working in computer science or informatics, 4% pursuing informatics graduate degrees, and 32% having completed informatics internships, suggesting AMIA First Look has the potential to increase informatics diversity.

The COVID-19 pandemic response in the United States has exposed significant gaps in information systems and processes that prevent timely clinical and public health decision-making. Specifically, the use of informatics to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, support COVID-19 care delivery, and accelerate knowledge discovery bring to the forefront issues of privacy, surveillance, limits of state powers, and interoperability between public health and clinical information systems. Using a consensus-building process, we critically analyze informatics-related ethical issues in light of the pandemic across 3 themes: (1) public health reporting and data sharing, (2) contact tracing and tracking, and (3) clinical scoring tools for critical care. We provide context and rationale for ethical considerations and recommendations that are actionable during the pandemic and conclude with recommendations calling for longer-term, broader change (beyond the pandemic) for public health organization and policy reform.

This review describes recent experimental and focus group research on graphics as a method of communication about quantitative health risks. Some of the studies discussed in this review assessed effect of graphs on quantitative reasoning, others assessed effects on behavior or behavioral intentions, and still others assessed viewers' likes and dislikes. Graphical features that improve the accuracy of quantitative reasoning appear to differ from the features most likely to alter behavior or intentions. For example, graphs that make part-to-whole relationships available visually may help people attend to the relationship between the numerator (the number of people affected by a hazard) and the denominator (the entire population at risk), whereas graphs that show only the numerator appear to inflate the perceived risk and may induce risk-averse behavior. Viewers often preferred design features such as visual simplicity and familiarity that were not associated with accurate quantitative judgments. Communicators should not assume that all graphics are more intuitive than text; many of the studies found that patients' interpretations of the graphics were dependent upon expertise or instruction. Potentially useful directions for continuing research include interactions with educational level and numeracy and successful ways to communicate uncertainty about risk.