The WHO has issued an invitation for public comment on a draft report titled “Advancing the Responsible Use of Digital Technologies in Global Health”, a review from the WHO Science Council exploring the “relatively slow pace” with which digital technologies have been incorporated into the health sector in comparison to the “more rapid adoption of digital tools in other enterprises” such as transportation, entertainment, and finance.
The resulting draft report notes a total of nine recommendations across the categories of connecting, educating, investing, and evaluating, to overcome obstacles to the wider use of digital technology for health.
Despite digital health aspirations being “high” for most countries, the draft report states, “there are many obstacles to realising the full potential for impact, particularly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, where the lack of adequate national plans, policies, and foundational infrastructure makes deriving benefits more difficult and relatively costly. The council notes that whilst support for the implementation of digital health “must grow”, this is only possible if it is viewed as an investment, “not simply a cost”, suggesting that “more rigorous evaluations may contribute to a stronger case for investments”.
The draft moves on to set out nine obstacles to the incorporation of digital health technologies: lack of interconnected infrastructure, interoperability, and connectivity; limited user-friendly tools adapted to diverse populations, language, and cultural barriers; resistance to digital adoption and “inadequate digital training” amongst health professionals; a “major shortage” of health workers skilled in digital technologies and a lack of career paths; underinvestment in digital health, “fragmented funding”, and limited collaboration across public administration private sectors; disparities in access to digital health tools; “insufficient availability of data” on effectiveness and ROI of digital health initiatives; a lack of “robust mechanisms” for ongoing monitoring and adaptation to “meet evolving needs”; and a lack of “adequate concern” over equity, privacy, and security..
Following-up on these identified obstacles, the draft report puts forward nine recommendations: ensuring multi-stakeholder engagement in the design and development of digital health policies and services; promoting the adoption of a unifying approach to digital health to improve service delivery and patient care; and strengthening population health, disease prevention and diagnosis, and readiness and resilience to public health threats, using digital tools and supported by AI.
It continues to recommend: developing a digitally skilled health workforce through required training programmes; addressing the need for digital skills in the health workforce and gaps in digital literacy among patients; establishing a collaborative platform for economic evaluations of digital health to inform investment planning; fostering greater private sector engagement; and establishing mechanisms for evaluation and continuous learning in digital health tech.
The report also highlights the upcoming expiry of the WHO Global Strategy on Digital Health in 2025, stating that “there is a need for a revised, strengthened and expanded WHO strategy –a strategy that includes the role of emerging technology, such as data science and AI; acknowledges new opportunities and persistent challenges;, and enacts the recommendations framed within this report”.
The call for comment is open until the 29 January 2025. For more details, and to read the draft report in full, please click here.
Wider trend: International digital health transformation
The WHO announced the launch of the Global Initiative on Digital Health (GIDH) in 2023, which operates as a WHO-managed network and platform with the aim of supporting implementation of WHO’s global digital health strategy. The GIDH initiative sets out to encourage global partnerships; bringing organisations across the world together to “achieve measurable outcomes” by improving transparency and reporting of digital health resources.
At the end of last year, the WHO also published a handbook for digital transformation in primary care, discussing the digitalisation of paper records and the broader move toward digitalisation “which can ultimately lead to digital transformation, fundamentally changing how health services are delivered and accessed”.
And HTN’s panel discussion featuring international experts in the field of health tech explored current digital capabilities, projects, and priorities from country contexts including Spain, Bermuda, and the UK.
