Health for all through digital collaboration

Abstract

2020 was an eventful year, with the Brexit vote and the COVID-19 pandemic. With health professionals focused on the pandemic, treatments for other conditions have fallen from the priority list and many of the effects of the pandemic could be everlasting. The European Commission’s Health and Food Safety Commissioner, Stella Kyriakides delivered a keynote speech to the World Health Summit 2020 in which she discussed how best to achieve health for all through digital collaboration. She acknowledged that the impact of the virus has further highlighted the importance of digital solutions and outlined the focus of her intervention which expanded across three key areas: ‘how digital solutions enable better health outcomes; what the EU is doing; and what we can do to build global collaboration in this area’. She said that digital solutions are key to making effective use of data as they ‘allow better use of health data in research and innovation, enabling stronger and more resilient health and social care systems’. Kyriakides also acknowledged the challenges that digital tools present in the form of privacy and personal data concerns. There are plans to create a common European Health Data Space (EHDS) to ‘foster collaboration and to harness data for better healthcare, better research, and better evidence-based policy making for the benefit of patients’. Kyriakides said that digital tools have the potential to benefit countries across the globe and that the ‘strategic and innovative use of digital health tools can make an important contribution to essential international objectives’.