Future Developments of Digital Health and Considerations on Sustainability

The transformation of future healthcare capacity through the digitisation of healthcare systems will enable these systems to respond to future emergencies, as well as increased population pressures. The realisation over the last few decades that technologically empowered solutions can be implemented and work well, including within LMICs, was further expanded through the recent pandemic. Current challenges pertain to the scaling up of digital healthcare technologies, and their sustainability post-introduction in the field. Solutions to these challenges have already emerged, such as synthetic data, which allows the use of high-quality datasets without compromising the security of the original datasets. Ultimately, health outcomes can potentially be improved within an active health-data ecosystem, where both patients and healthcare providers are active participants, i.e. both generating and ingesting healthcare data. However, for that to be achieved, the sustainability of digitalization of healthcare in LMICs needs to be considered through the lens of infrastructural, financial, ethical and regulatory concerns.