Digital Health Emergency Management—Pandemics and Beyond
Lennart Reifels, Virginia S.G. Murray · JAMA Network Open · 2022
Major public health emergencies can provide both the impetus and windows of opportunity to innovate and advance existing health care systems.The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of digital health systems (including digital health data, tools, technologies, and services) in monitoring and combating adverse health effects of the pandemic.Simultaneously, relevant health care stakeholders have often been underprepared to fully embrace digital health solutions and rise to the pandemic challenge.The consensus statement by Al Knawy et al 1 makes an important and timely contribution to advancing the digital health agenda in the context of pandemics and communicable diseases.The Riyadh Declaration on Digital Health, formulated by an international interdisciplinary team of medical, academic, and industry experts at the Riyadh Global Digital Health Summit in August 2020, provided digital health recommendations that should be adopted by the global health community to address the challenges of the current pandemic and future pandemics.Among others, these recommendations called for the implementation of data-driven and evidence-based protocols for effective communication, a standard global minimum data set and governance structure for public health data, and surveillance systems as a core component for rapid preparedness and global responses.Based on international expert consensus and cross-sectoral lessons learned from the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, the authors stipulate 5 key themes and corresponding actions that are designed to foster the implementation of the recommendations of the Riyadh Declaration on Digital Health.The 5 key themes are team (close collaboration between stakeholders), transparency and trust (preservation of the right to privacy and consent), technology (application of the latest technology to data), techquity (equal access to digital health capabilities), and transformation (empowering people and systems to improve health and prevent disease).Many of the key issues identified as pivotal to advancing future digital health preparedness and applications in the context of pandemics (such as the need to establish protocols to govern health data sharing, integration, and interoperability across often disparate health care systems) are also at the heart of broader global policy and data science efforts to reduce the risk of disaster and manage health care emergencies.2,3 Digital health initiatives with a focus on pandemics will therefore benefit from stronger integration with related insights from the fields of disaster risk reduction and health emergency management, where such issues have received considerable attention in recent years.A designated digital health agenda, in turn, is bound to provide invaluable tools and insights to strengthen existing approaches to public health emergency management in relation to future epidemics and pandemics and, beyond that, preventing and managing the health risks and consequences of varied types of hazards and disasters.FAIR principles (which ensure that data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) have been recognized as fundamental to research in disaster risk reduction and fostering coherence in data collection and progress monitoring activities against seminal United Nations 2015-2016 landmark agreements (including the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement for Climate Change, and the New Urban Agenda). 4 To share common data, we need to have shared terminology, such as for what constitutes hazards.The recently released Supplement to the UNDRR-ISC (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction-International Science Council) Hazard Definition & Classification Review provides a common set of 302 hazard information profiles, addressing hazard definitions and metrics across 8 general hazard types (meteorologic and hydrologic, extraterrestrial, geohazards, environmental, chemical, +