Combining digital trends and scientific literature: a case study on Social Determinants of COVID-19

Abstract

Digital sources such as Internet-based search tools have created prospects for augmenting traditional public health surveillance. These can support the identification of emerging public health concerns, intervention evaluation or policy making. Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) are key factors linked to health outcomes yet they are poorly recorded and seldom used. Scientific papers have reported SDoH impacts on various outcomes yet this data has not been explored for population trend analyses. We present an analysis of our approach to combining insights mined from PubMed with online search trends.