Foresight in innovation and global health to support the world's vulnerable and underserved populations
Foresight in innovation and global health to support the world's vulnerable and underserved populations
The Global Health & Digital Innovation Foundation (GHDIF) is a non-profit organization founded by key experts in health technology, population health, innovation, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital health, with a proven track record in international development influencing global health policy.
GHDIF is an innovation and global health foresight organization that actively supports sustainable digital futures for all, prioritizing the world's vulnerable and underserved populations, including their impact on healthcare, public health, research and development.
Our goal is to build on our extensive combined experience to strengthen health systems and policy reforms with the power of innovation, fundamentally re-approaching the digital health paradigm as a means to achieving SDG-3 targets, particularly relating to universal health coverage and the support of the health workforce. By connecting transformational innovation stakeholders within particular problem spaces, establishing viable digital cooperation, we aim to demonstrate and enable a paradigm shift in global health foresight, in health equity monitoring and in care-embedded research to strategically involve industry startups and scaleups.
We believe that a primary objective is to seamlessly connect translational AI partners across the entire digital innovation ecosystem to address a predicament almost unique to health care, where fragmentation leads to a pace of “technology-creates risks and complexities” by far exceeding that at which technology addresses these risks. Precision cancer care, maternal and child care, and mental health come at the top of our list of priorities.
Our Goals for 2030 toward the 2030 SDG Agenda and calls for Open Government Data, are:
AI will profoundly impact the velocity and scale of changes in healthcare delivery. Our mission is to ensure this disruptive change is transformed to a transparent, ethical and sustainable development that ensures true equity and inclusion for vulnerable populations and communities around the world.
We work to strategically direct resources and funding to intelligent healthcare transformation cycles - as an advisor, intermediary or implementing partner in privately funded and international development projects, leveraging trusted digital cooperation laboratories and micro-ecosystems where innovation can foster and enable learning healthcare, maximizing the return on investments, impact, scalability and sustainability.
The objective for each digital marketplace we support is to synthesize remote care interventions into population-based prevention with individual-level clinical care improvements. Our role is to direct action to build data ecosystems with wide-ranging multidisciplinary efforts, adapting strategies to the political environment, the available technical infrastructure, and human capital.
Despite the several standards developed over the years, the industry persistently lacks standards that leverage data as an innovation production factor, making data part of the value supply chain and medical liability framework. The industry lacks meta-data standards which should aim to connect the vibrant digital-phenotyping device-driven innovation market to core institutional and national translational medicine capacities, to accelerate reliable and scalable AI development and deployment as part of an overall digital innovation acceleration life cycle.
The resources we manage in a systems capital approach to portfolio management include knowledge from translational research and reverse translation, data capital and industry standards, regulatory policy, and partner operations, delivered as a global cooperation platform where innovative ideas can scale together with AI to accelerate evidence-based policies and transformation cycles.
The World Health Organization provides a detailed framework, methodologies, guidance and resources to facilitate reliable, high-quality summary measures are generated while monitoring health inequalities and for the synthesis, exchange and application of knowledge from stakeholders to accelerate the benefits of global and local innovation in strengthening health systems and improving health.
We adopt this model and augment available sources of data and access channels with the participation of cooperating data ecosystem partners, delivering trusted, auto-validated, patient-centric data governance and value upcycling from PROs all the way to knowledge translation for policy decision making. Data channels with specific targeting are thus readily available. Moreover, with our approach, the knowledge translation considerations proposed by WHO along the five stages remain relevant and readily addressed.
Our strategy for connected innovation consists of a three-pronged approach:
1. Standardisation: Development and adoption of a series of industry standards designed to enable cooperation, improved productivity, efficiencies and added value in terms of the impact of digital health innovations. The focus is on interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration, on networking, diversity, and decentralization, leading to more resilient and adaptable systems.
2. Collaboration: Innovation clusters resemble standards development sandboxes which, being micro-environments, offer ideal conditions to develop and stress-test domain-specific implementations of base specifications. The design and development of innovation cluster projects is based on several tools identifying needs and service providers, on our participation in projects as an implementation partner, and on various educational and technology transfer activities.
3. Learning: Advocacy and support for policy reforms to assemble individual results into social innovation and change, toward health systems that promote and reward systems medicine development, new P4 (preventive, personalised, precision, participatory) medical practice pathways, and technologies and innovation which enable the deployment and scaling of AI for translational research. Coupling digital care innovation with clinical research, translational precision research and new approaches to clinical trials is key for demonstrations of the value of standards and collaboration toward learning healthcare and new evidence-based policy paradigms.
We re-approach the transformation of health systems for sustainability, resilience, equity and digital inclusion, building on lessons learned from the past, with our experience leading large-scale international development projects.
We adopt patient-centric health system designs as a core tenet of sustainable transformation, exploiting the extraordinary momentum building up in the health and digital innovation space, and catalysing the further coordinated development of each of these with sharable data values, and with collaboration inspired at the level of data resources, promoting and supporting shared innovation spaces and shared learning from national to international contexts.
We propose a digital innovation acceleration superstructure that connects DHIs across the care continuum, comprised of standards that enable telehealth governance and regulatory policies that:
(a) enable data resource innovation
(b) address governance and transparency issues inhibiting DHIs from expanding into community health and public health
(c) lend structure to real-world data for trusted evidence
(d) provide a new pathway to radically different structures in delivery models
(e) reduce healthcare worker’s workload
(f) improve outreach, engagement, and prevention at scale, all while
(g) collecting and upcycling structured data
Appropriate standards must aim to deliver a digital cooperation ecosystem and to support the integration of DHIs into a patient centric continuum to provide connectivity and interoperability between DHIs and enable the seamless transition of activity from one telehealth service to another.
