Digital health, including its latest data-driven manifestations, is already a feature of European healthcare systems even if this may not be obvious, and it is heralding major changes in other public health-related areas.
A new paper from EPHA aims to provide a revealing yet non-exhaustive overview of how digitalisation is manifesting itself in different facets of public health, as represented by EPHA’s membership, which comprises over 80 organisations representing different parts of the public health community.
Based partly on a members’ survey conducted in 2019, it complements our previous publications on digital health, and also offers a broader perspective by exploring the impact of digitalisation in other EPHA priority areas: agriculture and NCD prevention, antimicrobial resistance, access to medicines, trade, air pollution, and fundamental rights / tackling inequities, which in turn influence population health. The picture which emerges resembles that of an unsolved puzzle: the pieces are available, yet they do not always fit neatly together. It
will still take a good number of years for a coherent image to emerge before a reliable assessment of the value of digitalisation in public health can be made. Download the report below.