Suicide mortality rates are a strong indicator of population mental-health and can be used to determine the efficacy of prevention measures. Monitoring suicide mortality rates in real-time provides an evidence-base to inform targeted interventions in a timely manner and accelerate suicide prevention responses. This paper outlines the importance of real-time suicide surveillance in the context of policy and practice, with a particular focus on public health and humanitarian crises.

Crises are socially constructed. Affected stakeholders of an organizational crisis conceive complex associations between their perceptions of the implicated company's response and about the company itself. The study moves away from a simple cause–effect view by deriving alternative configurations of these associations. This approach allows for a better understanding of how stakeholders attribute responsibility for a critical event and the resulting crisis faced by the company that caused it. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we analyze insights of 325 families affected by an environmental incident in 2018 involving Colombia's largest company. We establish a correlation between stakeholders' perceptions of crisis response timeliness and credibility. Accordingly, we expand on how perceptions affect organizational judgments. Finally, we propose that trustworthiness and reputation are antecedents to how organizational crisis response is perceived and how these antecedents affect the degree of the severity of the company crisis.

We argue that voluntary mental health registries integrated into the 9-1-1 system, where patients and caregivers can establish a repository of this information, will help fill this information gap by enabling first responders to quickly understand the context of a call for service with a mental health component, and to make better informed decisions. Despite valid concerns about privacy, stigma, and the potential misuse of protected health information, such registries, if carefully designed and administered, can improve the health outcomes of 9-1-1 calls for service involving mental health-related crises.

Aggregated data from mobile network operators (MNOs) can provide snapshots of population mobility patterns in real time, generating valuable insights when other more traditional data sources are unavailable or out-of-date. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the value of remotely-collected, high-frequency, localized data in inferring the economic impact of shocks to inform decision-making. However, proper protocols must be put in place to ensure end-to-end user-confidentiality and compliance with international best practice. We demonstrate how to build such a data pipeline, channeling data from MNOs through the national regulator to the analytical users, who in turn produce policy-relevant insights. The aggregated indicators analyzed offer a detailed snapshot of the decrease in mobility and increased out-migration from urban to rural areas during the COVID-19 lockdown. Recommendations based on lessons learned from this process can inform engagements with other regulators in creating data pipelines to inform policy-making.

The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a wake-up call for humanitarian aid actors to reconsider data collection methods, as old ways of doing business become increasingly obsolete. Although access to information on the affected population is critical now more than ever to support the pandemic response, the limitation of aid workers’ presence in the field imposes hard constraints on relief projects. In this article, we consider how aid actors can use “big data” as a crisis response tool to support humanitarian projects, in cases when the General Data Protection Regulation is applicable. We also provide a framework for examining open-source platforms, and discuss the advantages and privacy challenges of big data.