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Top1. Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has produced profound impacts on society. It has generated a rapid demand for the use of innovative information technology (IT) in mitigating the adverse effects of COVID-19 on public health, society, and the economy (O’Leary, 2020). State-of-the-art technologies and applications need to be actively used, deployed, or created to track and contain coronavirus outbreaks (De Moya, Pallud, & Wamba, 2021), including tracking those infected and their close contacts, to support quarantine and lockdown (WHO, 2020), and produce exemplary solutions for mitigation and elimination of COVID-19. To help curb the COVID-19 pandemic, public health agencies, healthcare providers, and epidemiologists need to know timely population information about coronavirus infected people, including those hospitalized, the demographic data from those confirmed patients, the length of the hospital stay, and how the health systems take care of those in needs (He, Zhang, & Li, 2021).
On the other hand, the COVID-19 outbreak has raised opportunities to advance technology-based solutions. The prominence of telehealth, telework, and online education in response to the coronavirus threat has demonstrated that technology is essential in managing and reducing the coronavirus risks during the pandemic and even after. It is well known that IT plays a vital role in healthcare, clinical decision support, group decision making, emergency/crisis response, and risk management (Chen et al., 2008; Angst & Agarwal, 2009; Ben-Assuli & Padman, 2020; Thompson et al., 2019). A growing number of technology companies and IT professionals are working in various ways to help fight the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (Mingis, 2020).
There is currently a shortage of research contributions in information systems (IS) to help fight the COVID-19. IS scholars should contribute to this global effort to fight against COVID-19 and future pandemics by leveraging their previous experience and knowledge on responding to crises, decision making, remote working, managing virtual teams, analyzing large data sets, etc. (Ågerfalk, Conboy, & Myers, 2020). What can IS researchers and practitioners do to help fight COVID-19 specifically? O’Leary (2020) has recently provided a list of areas that IS/IT scholars could contribute to. However, how to carry out the work in these areas remains an open question.
This paper focuses on data and system interoperability, a specific area that IS scholars could contribute knowledge and insights to fight against COVID-19. Interoperability is the ability to exchange and apply information from different systems and applications timely, accurately, effectively, and consistently (Dogac et al., 2007; Iroju et al., 2013; Costin and Eastman 2019). Data interoperability in healthcare is essentially an unreached goal and is needed stronger than ever (Freeman et al., 2020; Sreenivasan et al., 2020). Improved interoperability is the key to managing COVID-19 spread and future pandemics (McClellan et al., 2020). Interoperability in healthcare during a pandemic will make it easier to gather related data from various data sources, understand how it spreads, help different stakeholders (such as the governments, healthcare providers, and other organizations) for evidence-based decisions making, and improve their response to COVID-19 and future pandemics.