Toronto, November 11, 2026: JMIR Publications invites submissions on “Planetary Health Informatics” in its open access journal JMIR Medical Informatics. The premier, peer-reviewed journal is indexed in MEDLINE, PubMed, PubMed Central, DOAJ, Scopus, and the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE).
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
