Can India leverage the global strategy to become a facilitator?
The vision of the draft Global Strategy for Digital Health 2020-25 of the World Health Organization (WHO) (available at https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/documents/gs4dhdaa2a9f352b0445bafbc79ca799dce4d.pdf) is to improve health for everyone, everywhere. This can be done by accelerating the development and adoption of appropriate, affordable, scalable and sustainable digital health solutions. These could prevent, detect and respond to epidemics and pandemics, develop infrastructure and applications that enable countries to use health data to promote health and well being. It would also enable them to achieve the health-related Sustainable Development Goals and the triple billion targets of WHO’s Thirteenth General Program of Work, 2019–2023.
The purpose of the global strategy is to strengthen health systems through the application of digital health technologies for consumer/people and healthcare providers towards achieving the vision of health for all. The strategy is designed to be fit for purpose and for use by all Member States including those with limited access to digital technologies, goods and services.
In the context of this global strategy, digital health is understood to mean “the field of knowledge and practice associated with the development and use of digital technologies to improve health”. This definition encompasses eHealth. Digital health expands the concept of eHealth to include digital consumers, with a wider range of smart and connected devices. It also encompasses other uses of digital technologies for health such as IoT), advanced computing, big data analytics, AI including ML, and robotics.
The global digital strategy emphasizes that health data is to be classified as sensitive personal data/ personally identifiable information that requires the high safety and security standard. Therefore, it stresses the need for a strong legal and regulatory base to protect privacy, confidentiality, integrity and availability of data. What is also important is the processing of personal health data and deal with cybersecurity, trust building, accountability and governance, ethics, equity, capacity building and literacy. This could ensure good data quality is collected and subsequently shared to support planning, commissioning and transformation of services.’
The “digital determinants of health”, such as digital and data literacy i.e., literacy in information and communication technologies (ICT) and access to equipment, broadband and the Internet, become more important as digital health becomes more prevalent. The global strategy underscores the need to ground digital foundations within national strategies and emphasizes the need to work with different sectors and stakeholders at all levels.
The global strategy promotes syntactic and semantic interoperability with WHO norms and standards as a cornerstone of health information to enable sharing of information in a connected world.
The appropriate use of digital health takes the following dimensions into consideration: health promotion and disease prevention, patient safety, ethics, interoperability, intellectual property, data security (confidentiality, integrity, and availability), privacy, cost-effectiveness, patient engagement, and affordability. It should be people-centered, trust-based, evidence-based, effective, efficient, sustainable, inclusive, equitable, and contextualized. The growing global challenge of digital waste on health and the environment must also be appropriately managed.
Hopefully India will be able to leverage the global strategy that sets out a vision, strategic objectives, and a framework for action and implementation principles to advance digital health, globally and in countries both at national and sub-national levels. India is capable of becoming a facilitator and role model in an internationally connected digital health system.
