**4. Discussion**

The specific nature of COVID-19 pandemic requires strong coordination of connected data, people, and systems to facilitate worldwide collaboration in fighting against it. From this study, we notice that healthcare stakeholders are not using the same systems, data formats, or standards. This can obstruct the ability to identify the possible trends of solutions to the pandemic related challenges and develop interventions among the associated efforts. Public health researchers, epidemiologists, and government officials need to be connected via integrated systems with connected data to understand the evolving pandemic better and make collective decisions on addressing this crisis. An important key action that needs to be taken to ensure best possible fight of the current (or even future) pandemic(s) is to catalyze scaling up the implementation of AI and ML in health sector.

Our study specifically suggests the following important issues that need to be addressed intensely and more efficiently:

