[upbeat electronic music]
Katherine: Hi, everyone.
I'm Katherine, and I lead product for research and innovations at Google.
As you just heard, smartphones and mobile apps
are vital tools for community health workers,
especially in rural communities,
helping them provide better, more coordinated care.
These tools help people like Stellah check on their patient's vital signs
like blood pressure,
and ensure that these communities have more of a connection to their care.
Ultimately, this can improve health outcomes at the population level.
We know that we need to be more responsive in pandemics.
We know that there's a growing burden of preventable conditions
like diabetes and hypertension around the world.
We know that just having access to care can save lives.
There are many talented--
this is also why it's critical for us to help healthcare workers
use the technology to detect where care is needed most.
There are many talented health focused developers
who have worked to create such technologies,
but without suitable open standards,
many of these solutions built to date
are only able to address a single condition.
This leads to slow development in data silos,
making sharing and updating information challenging and expensive to achieve.
At Google, we really want to accelerate
the future of digital care in low-resource settings
to lower the barrier to equitable healthcare.
That's why we're announcing the launch of Open Health Stack,
a suite of open source tools to help local developers
create next generation healthcare apps.
Open Health Stack uses FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources,
as its underlying data standard.
That makes it easier to build patient-centered solutions
that can connect within and across healthcare systems.
For example, one component, the Android FHIR SDK,
makes data stored on the app secure and accessible offline,
so that it's safe and usable even in places without cell phone coverage
or internet access.
And by using FHIR Analytics Libraries,
we make it simpler to unlock key insights and health metrics,
and this can be deployed in local data centers or on the Cloud.
Open Health Stack also comes with robust design guidelines.
This helps developers quickly adopt best practices
to improve the community health worker experience.
We're proud of the organic adoption by partners leveraging Open Health Stack
to build new platforms that are being deployed across multiple countries
in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.
Open Health Stack adheres to privacy and safety best practices
and was developed in the service of United Nations
sustainable development goals.
This resulted in Open Health Stack and its components being designated
as a global good by Digital Public Goods Alliance
and Digital Square.
We've been collaborating closely with WHO on the Open Health Stack
for more than a year now to create standards based tools.
I'm happy to introduce you to Alain Labrique,
director of digital health and innovations at the WHO
to talk more about how we're enabling digital transformation in healthcare,
and how we've been working together.
[upbeat music] [applause]
Alain: Hi, folks. I'm Alain, and I'm delighted to be here today
to share the World Health Organization's support for this work
that strengthens technologies for global health.
The last three years have been such a hard road for all of us around the globe
struggling to make sense of a terrible pandemic.
The pandemic has, however, highlighted WHO's necessary role in global health,
and the importance of a strong, digital ecosystem in effective health systems.
Irrespective of where we may live on the planet,
countries have seen some great examples of what can be done with digital health,
and governments want to drive their own digital transformation.
They want citizens to be at the center
of how healthcare and well-being is achieved in the next decade.
WHO is proud to serve as the secretariat
for the global strategy on digital health.
It's a roadmap, a vision, a set of values
shared by the 194 countries that we serve.
More recently, we found our member states asking for help
in enabling a digital health transformation,
moving away from a sea of disconnected innovation
to a coordinated environment
where interoperability, standards, and good governance ensure that
people get the care that they need.
They also want to be able to trust;
to trust the quality, the security, the reliability of the systems being used
in their health journeys.
We at WHO are working to build those trusted protocols
according to the data standards
that will allow health to serve patient needs,
without putting people at risk of harm or exploitation.
We've recently begun doing this through digital adaptations of care guidelines.
We call these SMART guidelines,
Standards-based, Machine-readable, Adaptive,
Requirements-based, and Testable.
But that's not enough to empower the ecosystem.
So we're taking this one step further
by helping to inform the development of the Open Health Stack,
which empowers countries to build and maintain
the solutions around the SMART guidelines, harnessing local talent,
even in the most resource-constrained environments.
I'm thrilled to see us move one step closer towards this new era,
where interoperability is baked into the DNA
of what we do as a digital health ecosystem.
Interoperability is about putting people at the center
and enabling continuity of care.
Continuity of care is something we take for granted
in many high-income countries,
but which can be unlocked for people, no matter where they live,
once we move away from broken, disconnected, vertical solutions.
Lastly, we're working to ensure that these systems are safe.
Ensuring that the decisions being recommended are correct,
and the data collected are used to benefit
the person from whom that data is being collected.
And to ensure that systems are equitable,
leaving no one behind, no matter their gender or socioeconomic status.
Digital public goods and technologies such as Open Health Stack
help us to achieve this vision.
We're glad to be part of this journey and we want to thank you.
[upbeat electronic music]