WHO working with new innovations to improve global healthcare system

The World Health Organisation says it is working with new innovations to improve the global healthcare system and empower champions across the organisations and member states.

WHO said making the new innovations accessible and impactful to all that need them is its way of building knowledge, capacity, and confidence within its members to leverage innovation in order to accelerate health impact.

According to the Director-General, WHO, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, innovations and digital technologies are now integral to human daily life, where the world’s population has never been interconnected before.

He explained that innovation, particularly in the digital sphere, is happening at an unprecedented scale and its application to improve the health population remains largely untapped, yet there is immense scope for use of digital health solutions.

He said, “The WHO’s innovation in health approach is our commitment to work in new ways with our Member States, workforce and partners and leverage our respective strengths to find the most innovative solutions and bring them to the people that need them the most.”

Ghebreyesus, while urging the world to join the campaign, added that the WHO is harnessing the power of digital technologies and health innovation to accelerate the global attainment of sound health and well-being.

According to the Global Strategy on Digital 2020 – 2025, the spread of information and communications technology as well as global interconnectedness has great potential to accelerate human progress, to bridge the digital divide and develop society.

The global health body in a release, said, “An interoperable digital health ecosystem should enable the seamless transfer of data, and secure exchange of health data by, and between users – healthcare providers, health systems managers, and health data services. Health data are predominantly generated by and processed between healthcare providers and the healthcare community.

“Sharing health data in the context of a person-centric digital health ecosystem and for the purpose of public interest should be encouraged with the patient’s consent, when undertaken in a manner that is built on trust, protects patient privacy, secures digital systems, and protects against malign or inappropriate use.”

The WHO noted that such sharing is vital as it contributes to the enhancement of the quality of processes, the outcomes of health services and the continuity of care for patients.

The global health body also pointed out that the sharing may lead to the building of a knowledge database, which is able to interact with other data systems, including data on social determinants of health and registries.

According to WHO, “The secondary use of health data is important to improve the quality of health care and research effectiveness. It could enable testing, validating and benchmarking artificial intelligence solutions and big data analyses across various parameters and settings, as well as the continuity of care of patients.

“It also leads to the building of a knowledge base, which should be able to interact with other data systems, registries, etc. The secondary use of health data with appropriate deanonymisation of datasets would enable ethically managed testing, validating and benchmarking artificial intelligence solutions and big data analyses across various parameters and settings.

“However, further work resulting from the global strategy of WHO as a normative institution will give guidance and orientation to the public policymakers among Member States for their populations; healthcare care providers; the healthcare industry; manufacturers; investors and procurement authorities, when it comes to digitalisation in health care.”

SOURCE: PUNCH

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