PROMOTED CONTENT
By Jake Atkinson, campaigns and media officer, STOPAIDS, Sara (Meg) Davis, professor of digital health and rights, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, Ulla Jasper,
governance and policy lead, Fondation Botnar, Maria Malomalo, senior international research manager, Restless Development, and Sabina F Rashid, professor and dean, James P Grant School of Public Health, Brac University
Alternative futures for digital health
T he digital transformation of health holds the potential to prevent the next pandemic before it begins. It has transformed how people access health systems and seek care: Transnational participatory action research by the Digital Health and Rights Project, for example, finds that young people in low- and middle-income countries use smartphones, social media and social chat groups to empower themselves to access and share health information. Digital spaces revolutionise healthcare delivery, empower patients, strengthen health systems, and spot and have also created new possibilities for local innovation and ‘borderless’ communication. But to make the digital transformation work for all, we need digital health to meet diverse needs – and that requires a long-overdue conversation about how to create more inclusive and democratic forms of digital governance that address the appropriate role of the private sector. Given its powerful potential, it is unsurprising that global health agencies, philanthropies and development organisations are urging many countries to go ‘digital first’, and to rapidly pilot and scale up the use of new digital tools and artificial intelligence. But this development has often happened in a fragmented, piecemeal and
What would the future of digital health look like if it was created by and for the people, in all our diversity? There’s one way to find out – and it involves the participation of diverse health advocates and an intersectional lens
techno-optimistic fashion, based on diverse partnerships with private enterprises that promote unproven new interventions. In the rush to digitise, evidence-based public health and data and digital governance are too often left as afterthoughts. A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD But by now, it should be clear that the digital transformation is a double-edged sword. Some digital solutions promoted as panaceas during the Covid-19 pandemic have quietly flopped. Access to digital tools, such as smartphones,
and the online world are profoundly unequal, especially for women and girls in South Asia and Southern Africa. Globally, an onslaught of human rights violations is being both precipitated and rebuffed, almost in waves, by transformative digital technologies and their use. With every development that can expand access to health or empower more people, connecting them across borders, comes new questions of data security, privacy and algorithmic bias. Cyber-bullying, misinformation and disinformation, online abuse, hate speech and gender-based violence have
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Health: A Political Choice – From Fragmentation to Integration
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