PD 27 - Digital Health & AI for Pandemic Preparedness - World Health Summit 2020

Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the future of health protection, delivery and emergency management. Like HIV/AIDS in 2000 and the Ebola and Zika outbreaks in 2014 and 2016, the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) pandemic is a defining moment in global health security leadership. Marshalling a concerted global and regional effort for risk, resilience, response, reconstruction and recovery must this time include full multi-stakeholder engagement as essential to pandemic preparedness in the digital era. This will extend to future essential innovative funding mechanisms, R&D networks and Centers of Excellence. China’s COVID-19 response employed a strengthened national health system after the SARS 2003 and H1N1 2009 outbreaks, and widespread use of ubiquitous mobile and digital health and finance technologies in government and business partnership. All lack global standardization today, and COVID-19 has shockingly laid bare the fragmentation and chronic under-funding of national health systems across the world. Employing winning strategies with amplified ambition needs to be defined and disseminated for shared use at scale in the current planetary pandemic and beyond. COVID-19 is much more than a wake-up call for systemic and sustainable digital health ecosystem transformation. It has cruelly exposed the chasm in mindsets and modalities between not only the global health and financial communities, but also between global technology and pharmaceuticals industries. WHO, UN Member States, civil society and the private sector must radically rethink their anemic and anachronistic stratagems for pandemic preparedness, UHC 2030 and Chronic NCDs in the Digital Economy & Society of the 21st Century.