The World Health Organization (WHO) brought together partners, development agencies and digital health experts for a roundtable on 23 June.
The objectives of this meeting were to discuss and agree on how to accelerate and adopt Digital Health solutions, including Early Warning Disease Surveillance Systems, at all levels and thus promote digital transformation in health systems.
Another objective was the discussion on how to improve collaboration between the Global Digital Health Community that includes development partners, governments, academia, civil society and the private sector and contribute to the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In 2019, WHO's Department of Health and Innovation was created as a strategy to accelerate the use of public health technologies. In addition, WHO also has established a Technical Advisory Group on Digital Health, which serves as an advisory body on global digital health issues, specific to the development and implementation of global standards for the governance and supervision of digital, public or private health systems or products.
WHO is working to ensure that countries can carry out strategies that benefit from new technologies and thus achieve the SDGs. Artificial intelligence developments are currently used to combat COVID-19, for case tracking and monitoring of available resources. This is why global efforts to meet the objectives require a new paradigm of participation, with the meeting that had as participants various global organizations related to public health.
At the meeting, Dr Bruce Aylward, Senior Advisor for Organizational Change at WHO, presented his topic on Access to COVID-19 Tools and its Acceleration Processes. Subsequently, discussed the potential of Digital Health in the process of digitizing the health sector to achieve the SDGs topic presented by Dr. Naveen Rao of the Rockefeller Foundation.
The last theme was the Global Community of Digital Health, led by Stefan Germann, director of Fondation Botnar, a Swiss-based philanthropic foundation, where possible points of action were discussed for nearly an hour.
WHO has stated “that the use and expansion of digital health solutions can revolutionize the way people around the world achieve higher standards of health and access services to promote and protect their health and well-being,” rather the importance of meetings that bring together different actors and participants in WHO strategies and objectives.
