Unregulated digital platforms can amplify pseudoscience, promote unverified health interventions and target users with harmful content – without accountability. Meanwhile, AI tools are deployed in health care with minimal oversight, leading to possibly inaccurate diagnoses, reinforcing systemic biases or increasing cybersecurity risks. The rapid commercialisation of health data, often without informed consent, poses ethical and privacy risks, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where regulatory safeguards are weakest. WHY THE G7 MUST LEAD G7 members have the world’s most developed health systems. They also host many of the largest technology firms and vast health data infrastructures, and drive a significant portion of global health research. They have both the responsibility and capacity to act. The European Union is home to innovative legislation to ensure data protection and regulate digital services and platforms. A coordinated G7 approach to digital health platform regulation would serve three goals. First, it would safeguard users, ensuring platforms do no harm and uphold core public health principles. Second, it would prevent regulatory fragmentation, enabling innovation to flourish within clear, ethical guardrails. And third, it would offer a model for global cooperation, especially crucial for countries with inadequate resources to regulate powerful tech platforms. The G7 should develop a joint policy framework with minimum standards for the safety, transparency and accountability of digital health platforms. This includes mandatory disclosures about health algorithms, limits on data extraction and protocols for moderating health-related misinformation. Second, G7 members should fund and “The G7 – the world’s most powerful democracies and technology leaders – is uniquely positioned to lead a coherent response to the emerging risks posed by unregulated digital health platforms”
// ILONA KICKBUSCH llona Kickbusch is the founding director of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She is a member of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board and the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All. She is co-chair of the World Health Summit Council. She previously had a distinguished career with the World Health Organization and Yale University, and has published widely on global health governance and global health diplomacy. She directs the Digital Transformations for Health Lab. She and John Kirton are co-editors of, most recently, Health: A Political Choice – Building Resilience and Trust .
X-TWITTER @IlonaKickbusch ilonakickbusch.com
promote public-interest alternatives – open-source digital health tools, equitable telehealth platforms and robust digital infrastructure in underserved regions. These investments must prioritise inclusion and sustainability. Third, the G7 should partner with global institutions such as the World Health Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to support shared governance mechanisms, including international observatories to monitor platform practices and regulatory sandboxes to test digital innovations. Finally, any regulatory agenda must require public engagement. Building digital health literacy, involving civil society and embedding rights-based approaches are essential to creating a digital health ecosystem that people can trust. Digital health must serve everyone, regardless of geography, income, age or ability. PAVE THE WAY FOR A GLOBAL COMPACT The G7 would thus pave the way for a Global Compact on Digital Health Governance – a voluntary yet normative framework of shared principles, responsibilities and cooperative mechanisms for managing digital health technologies and health data across borders. It would help ensure equity, trust, safety and public benefit, and protect individual rights, and advance equity, resilience and trust in health systems worldwide. It would guide ethical and equitable digital health development, ensure international
cooperation on cross-border digital health challenges and empower countries, especially in the Global South, with capacity and safeguards. It could build on existing efforts by the WHO, OECD, Global Digital Compact, African Union Digital Health Strategy and the EU’s AI and data protection frameworks, as well as the International Health Regulations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It could also establish a multilateral platform to develop the global compact by reaching out to the G20 and including regional bodies as well as international organisations. Importantly, it would establish digital health observatories to track deployments, harms and innovations, to share best practices, benchmarks and impact assessments, and to provide technical support and peer-review mechanisms. Supporting such observatories could attract major philanthropies. A TURNING POINT FOR GLOBAL HEALTH The G7 must help prepare the world for the future. It can no longer neglect the global impact – political, economic, social and health – of the digital transformation. It must recognise the global public health implications of inaction. It can choose to set a responsible and inclusive course for the digital future of health. Regulating digital health platforms is not about stifling innovation. It is about ensuring that innovation serves people – equitably, ethically and safely.
93 globalgovernanceproject.org
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