Pandemic End in Sight, We Surge Forward

Raymond L. Rosales

Apr 2023 DOI 10.35460/2546-1621.2023-0042

Pandemic End in Sight, We Surge Forward

The World Health Organization (WHO) has not declared Covid-19 as officially over, but we do see the numbers of confirmed cases dwindle significantly. As of April 17, 2023, the global total of confirmed cases is only 75,409, which is about .000099% of the overall total from January 1, 2020, to April 19, 2023, of 763,740,140. The suffering and devastation gleaned from 60,942,655 total reported deaths, is something we cannot and will not forget [World Health Organization Coronavirus (Covid-19) Dashboard. https://covid19.who.int/].

We do, however, have to move on. The challenge of improving medicine, healthcare and research is at the heart of every public health mission.

We see the emergence of many new innovations in medicine spurred on by artificial intelligence (AI) including robot-assisted surgeries, intelligent prostheses to virtual applications such as digitization of medical health records or electronic health records, telehealth check-ins, adverse event warnings, medical AI chatbots, among others. Although we think the risks and benefits of some of these technologies are still being assessed, we do believe that they have the potential to improve patient outcomes and contribute ultimately to more efficient research.

In JMUST, we seek authors who had or are continually responding to the challenge of undertaking clinical studies and writing them for publication. The benefits of research and publication can never be overstated. There is always a need to build and access knowledge to improve health care. We foresee that sooner than later some aspects of AI-applied research will come up as well.

Even with the pandemic, JMUST pushed on with our publications with the enduring generosity of our editorial board in reviewing articles and providing much-needed advice. With the pandemic end in sight, we surge forward with more articles contributed by domestic and international authors. With the seamless aid of our dedicated electronic authoring and publishing platforms, we are able to take on hundreds of article submissions all year round and publish in real-time. To date, JMUST articles are captured by ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Academia and Semantic Scholar, among others. JMUST articles are aggregated in the Western Pacific Regional Index Medicus and the HERDINPlus. JMUST articles are also in the repositories of the Potico (Ithaca, New York), the National Library (Philippines) and the UST Library. As a result of this, the number of citations of JMUST articles is steadily increasing and it is being cited by articles published by highly reputed journals – an endorsement of the quality of articles published in JMUST. Moreover, in the recent past, JMUST has been successful in getting submissions from not only outside of UST but also from outside the Philippines. 

For our April 2023 issue, we have the following articles: 5 on observational studies; 3 on public health, 2 case reports; 1 on Q-methodology; 1 meta-analysis; 1 systematic review; 1 medical education, 1 viewpoint and 1 news article. 

Grateful to all peer reviewers and editorial board members who took the time, as always, to help us complete this issue for publication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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