Nations join hands together to launch global digital health partnership in Australia

13 countries including Australia, India, and Canada are developing an international collaboration between public agencies to serve funding, policy, and delivery of eHealth services to their citizens.

Australia’s National Digital Health Strategy has started an initiative called as ”The Collaborative”. This initiative was launched last year in August and it focuses on NDHS’s models pertaining to child health. With this initiative, accessibility, efficiency, safety, and quality of child health would be improved.

Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network, Australian Digital Health Agency, and eHealth NSW jointly launched this initiative in order to provide comprehensive digital health record of the child from the time of conception until critical first years including adolescence.

A partnership of WHO and Hong Kong SAR has established a global network to support eHealth technology across Australia. This will remove the traditional ways of storing individual’s health in multiple papers, thereby increasing clinic’s efficiency in eHealth services.

Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP) had 13 countries as participants, including Australia, Austria, India, Canada, Italy, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden, the US and the UK. GDHP aims to be an international collaboration between public agencies, MNC’s and government that would eventually serve in funding, policy, and delivery of eHealth services to individuals. The Hon Greg Hunt MP, who is the Australian Minister for Health, along with Hon Shri Jagat Prakash Nadda- India’s Minister for Health and Family Welfare has graciously welcomed all participants in GDHP Summit that was held last week in Canberra.

Mr. Hunt during the summit said, “Digital Health is the penicillin of our time, with precision medicine and genomics offering opportunities to cure previously incurable diseases and deliver better life-saving medicine.”

He further said that the partnership will create a common platform for international experts to share knowledge and experiences, to network, and to forecast emerging trends to support the digital health landscape.

The topics that will be covered by GDHP during the coming year include:

1. connected and interoperable healthcare,
2. cybersecurity,
3. policies that support digital health outcomes,
4. clinician and consumer engagement, and
5. evidence and evaluation of digital health.

Through such collaboration, guardians and parents staying in Australia can easily access digital data with the help of My Health Record, which rolled out across the nation. School immunisation programs will help in capturing data, a child will interact with such programs and other health systems. Mother’s interaction from the time of child’s conception will be recorded digitally.

All such data will boost the mHealth performance, thus improving lives of many. Dr Michael Brydon-chief executive of SCHN said, “This will be of enormous value – not only to healthcare professionals providing care to those children – but to the children themselves as they become young adults and start making decisions about their own health and care.”

Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP) will help the people in Australia to improve their health through digital technologies.

However, The Collaborative confluence comprises of IT experts, 400 clinicians, consumers and researchers across the nation, thereby changing the child health scenarios by making a strong impact through eHealth technology.

This initiative will also provide a platform for industries, where they can try and test innovative tools in the digital health niche. Mr Tim Kelsey-CEO of ADHA said,” the Collaborative is a momentous opportunity to make a lasting difference to the long-term health of all young Australians, given that many predictors of an adult disease have their origins in childhood.”

Image credit: Australian Digital Health Agency