Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention

How will your commitment contribute to the digital transformation of health and the effective use of data to achieve UHC by 2030 in your specific country or region of focus?

Within the past decade, global health organizations and research institutions addressed the potential of digital health (through several mHealth initiatives) in revolutionizing the health systems in Low- and Middle-income Countries (LMICs). Furthermore, digital health plays an essential role in achieving the United Nation (UN) the Sustainable Development goals (SDGs), mainly Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Recently, COVID-19 had accelerated the adoption of digital health tools in LMICs to a great extent. However, ethical challenges are considered one of the main obstacles in digital health in which data privacy, protection, and consent along with ethical concerns relating to data ownership should be resolved. Particularly in LMICs, we need to address how to create a national health data governance strategy that will ensure data sharing and privacy protection.
The developed framework will provide a guideline for creating similar mHealth data governance strategies in LMICS (based on the novel framework of Health Data Governance Principles). We have identified three objectives for PCD governance, namely:
– Prioritize equity through establishing PCD rights and ownership,
– Protect people through building trust (patients’ perspective)
– Promote health value through enhancing systems and services (health system’s perspective)

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