PUBLIC HEALTH: A DIGITAL REVOLUTION

STEFAN BUTTIGIEG IS CO-FOUNDER AT DIGITAL HEALTH MALTA AND A SPECIALIST IN PUBLIC HEALTH MEDICINE. HE CURRENTLY LECTURES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MALTA FACULTY OF HEALTH SCIENCES ON THE TOPICS OF DIGITAL HEALTH AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN HEALTHCARE. FROM CONTACT TRACING APPS TO THE RISE OF OPEN SOURCE HE EXAMINES THE TECH CREATING TRANSFORMATIVE AND EFFECTIVE CHANGE.

We’ve heard about COVID-19 Dashboards, Github Repositories, Contact Tracing Apps, Digital Vaccination Cards, Daily COVID-19 updates. You’ve seen it all, and this would have not been possible without the silent digital revolution that took place with public health departments around the world. We have noted situations where this has happened practically overnight and underfunded public health departments suddenly had a flood of digital and human resources coming their way to help them tackle this sudden onslaught of information and new workflows.

Talk about digital revolutions in public health were in public and academic discussions for many years but there has never been the momentum that has been noted with the COVID-19 pandemic.

LEADING BY EXAMPLE - The Global lead of WHO

The World Health Organisation (WHO) took the lead in multiple ways in this silent digital revolution and made this happen through a number of initiatives. One of the flagship initiatives that supported the pandemic in more than 30 countries is Go.Data. Go.Data is a freely available outbreak management information system that supports national public health emergency responses with management of COVID-19 positive cases, their contacts and relevant linked data such as Lab Results, Event data and more.

This is just a fraction of the digital work done by WHO and their partners. They’ve worked on an international COVID-19 Dashboard, opened up multiple Github Open Source Repositories to support the Public Health Informatics and Data Science community and through Github and the momentous public support they even set up an open-sourced COVID-19 App that currently is being piloted in Nigeria. From the Artificial Intelligence point of view, there was also incredible work done on launching chatbots to combat misinformation on Facebook Messenger and Viber.

Even something as simple as the interactive timeline of the WHO’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic reflects strongly on the silent revolution that took place in one of the highest-ranking global health organisations.

chains of transmission. And how about Interoperability?

The collaboration across the European Union with respect to this has been ground-breaking and phenomenal with an EU Federation Gateway service delivered in a record-time.

Talking about Contact Tracing Apps, we even observed the classic battle for which technologies will be widely adopted as seen in the DP-3T (the decentralised model) VS PEPP-PT (centralised model). A technological battle that usually took years was compressed intensely in a period of 5-6 months with different technologies that had diverging philosophies and modus operandi. Does anyone remember the video format battles: Betamax vs VHS anyone? DVD vs Blu-Ray?

THE RISE OF OPEN-SOURCE

If you do a search on Github for COVID-19 you get more than 91,000 results. This attention has been unparalleled and has brought intensive efforts from all over the world to scale up data science efforts that supported the digital revolution. Ministries for Health or Technology from all around the world setup such as the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Sport in Netherlands, Israel’s Ministry of Health and even Poland’s Technology Ministry dedicated efforts to open-source repositories that are constantly updated with source code or COVID-19 related datasets.

THE WAY FORWARD - WILL THIS REVOLUTION END WITH COVID-19?

APPS, APPS and more APPS

The topic of Contact Tracing Apps was one of the digital public health highlights of 2020 and this can be clearly seen from the global and regional efforts that brought about these initiatives.

Contact Tracing Apps around the world designed landing pages that looked much more like Mobile App sites rather than government sites - simply have a look at the websites of some European Contact Tracing Apps such as Italy’s Immuni App, Malta’s COVID Alert and Irelands’ COVID Tracker. This made perfect sense in the mad rush to get as many users as possible on-boarded in order to break the

The silver lining of the COVID-19 Pandemic has definitely been the silent digital revolution of public health. Many public health professionals and organisations took steps forward that would have never thought possible if the pandemic didn’t happen.

How can we sustain this monumental growth and change?

The scaling up of digital resources needs to be enhanced with dedicated long-term funding, legal frameworks, increased human resource capability and strategies that need to be backed with significant investment in education and capacity building. Only through this holistic approach can the global public health movement move forward in the upcoming decade.

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