Call for Papers: Planetary Health Informatics

Biomedical and health informatics (BMHI) has traditionally focused on human-centric clinical data, electronic health records (EHRs), and health information systems to support individual patient care, clinical decision-making, and health system workflows. However, contemporary health crises driven by climate change, environmental degradation, and ecological disruption demand an expanded informatics paradigm that bridges clinical systems with planetary ecosystems.

JMIR Medical Informatics is launching an e-collection dedicated to planetary health informatics (PHI). PHI expands traditional health informatics theory, methods, and architectures beyond hospital walls and clinical boundaries toward Earth’s interconnected geophysical, ecological, and biological systems.

Building on clinical data standards, semantic interoperability, and integrative frameworks, this call for papers invites rigorous informatics research that links clinical, public health, and multispecies data streams into actionable planetary-scale learning health systems.

We explicitly invite submissions that advance the methodological, technical, and architectural foundations of health informatics to address planetary health challenges. Submissions should strongly emphasize informatics applications, frameworks, and evaluations across, but not limited to, the following core areas:

Clinical-Environmental Data Integration and Interoperability

• Informatics architectures for linking human EHRs with veterinary, wildlife, and environmental sensor data (eg, cross-species health data integration platforms like the Monarch Initiative)
• Semantic interoperability, ontologies, and controlled vocabularies harmonizing meteorological, geospatial, and clinical variables
• Integration of digital determinants of health (DDoH) and environmental exposure metrics into clinical decision support (CDS) systems

Surveillance, Biosecurity, and Metagenomic Informatics

• Advanced analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) pipelines for real-time metagenomic disease surveillance, pathogen tracking, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) monitoring
• Digital public health surveillance systems coupling clinical admissions data with environmental monitoring (eg, wastewater data, e-DNA, climate hazard indicators)
• Early-warning informatics models predicting climate-sensitive disease outbreaks (eg, vector-borne illnesses, zoonotic spillover)

Sustainable Health Systems and Green Digital Health

• Informatics frameworks for assessing and minimizing the carbon footprint and environmental life cycle impacts of health information technology infrastructures, data centers, and digital health tools
• Sustainable and green AI in health care: methodologies balancing the computational, energy, and carbon costs of large language models and machine learning with clinical utility
• Digital tools supporting circular economy models within health care delivery, supply chain management, and clinical equipment life cycles

Patient-Clinician Interactions and Sociotechnical Evaluations

• Evaluation of user interfaces (UI/UX), clinical utility, and workflow integration for planetary health decision support tools
• Medicolegal, data privacy, governance, and equity implications of scaling multidomain planetary health data platforms
• Informatics education and training frameworks preparing the next generation of health care professionals and informaticians for the Anthropocene

Also read the related JMIR Medical Informatics editorial, Informatics for the Planet: Integrating Species, Ecosystems, and Geophysical Data to Manage the Health of Earth Systems, for more information [1].

How to Submit:

Submit an article to JMIR Medical Informatics by selecting “Planetary Health Informatics” in the “Section” drop-down list. See the article How do I submit to a theme issue? in our Knowledge Base and consult our Instructions for Authors for more information.

All submissions will undergo a rigorous peer-review process, and accepted articles will be published under the "Planetary Health Informatics" e-collection in JMIR Medical Informatics.

All peer-reviewed articles will be made immediately and permanently open access.

Articles will be made immediately available in JMIR Preprints (with a DOI), if authors select this option at submission.

Submission deadline: Open call for submissions

Submit Now

Editors:

Arriel Benis, PhD, FIAHSI, SMIEEE, MACE

Adjunct Associate Professor, Duke University, NC, USA / Editor-in-Chief, JMIR Medical Informatics

Kathleen Gray, PhD

Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia

Sune Dueholm Müller, PhD

Professor, University of Oslo, Norway

Kenneth Winkel, PhD

Associate Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia (ORCID: 0000-0001-8282-6938)

Ann Borda, PhD

University of Melbourne, Australia / The Alan Turing Institute, UK

Reference

[1] Gray K, Benis A, Dueholm Müller S, Winkel K, Borda A. Informatics for the planet: integrating species, ecosystems, and geophysical data to manage the health of Earth systems. JMIR Med Inform. 2026; 14:e113778. DOI: 10.2196/113778