WHO Digital Health Virtual Round Table with the Development Partners

Introduction:

Digital technologies offer an unprecedented opportunity to change lives, transform economies, and stimulate growth through finding and sharing information. Using these technologies in the health sphere continues to be a transformative agent in low-income settings, where mobile connectivity has reached unprecedented penetration and ubiquity.

In the fight against COVID, technologies like artificial intelligence are used to assist with population screening, track infection cases, monitor resources - and more notably - to define the social determinants of health; the fundamental equity and human rights element in the fight against COVID-19.

For our part, WHO is working to enable countries to plan, adopt, and benefit from technologies that provide effective public health solutions, and thereby accelerate the achievement of SDG3.

This means leaving no one behind – children or adults, rural or urban – and using digital solutions to improve everyone’s health and well-being.

This unprecedented global effort will require political will, capital, infrastructure and advanced technologies in order to drive and scale progress.

It requires a new paradigm of engagement – a collaborative leadership approach driven by common goals and principles.

Background:

There is international support for a scale up of digital health by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has stated that ‘the use and scale up of digital health solutions can revolutionize how people worldwide achieve higher standards of health, and access services to promote and protect their health and well-being.’

In 2019, WHO established the Department of Digital Health and Innovation (DHI) to work on digital health technologies to fulfil World Health Assembly resolution WHA/71 A71. WHO has been developing plans to accelerate the use of technologies to meet global public health needs. 

WHO has also established a Digital Health Technical Advisory Group, to act as an advisory body on matters related to digital health, including the development, scale and implementation of global standards for governance and oversight of digital health products services and systems.

Objectives:

1. Discuss and agree on how to accelerate and adopt digital health solutions including early warning disease surveillance systems at all levels to jointly accelerate digital transformation of healthcare. 
2. Discuss how to enhance the power of collaboration and partnerships that brings together all the key stakeholders to build a network of networks, the Global Digital Health Community: Government, Development partners, Academia, Civil societies and the Private sector to ensure effective global coordination, create solidarity and contribute to the achievement of health-related SDGs.