Successfully Implementing Digital Health to Ensure Future Global Health Security During Pandemics: A Consensus Statement.

Importance: COVID-19 has highlighted widespread chronic underinvestment in digital health that hampered public health responses to the pandemic. Recognizing this, the Riyadh Declaration on Digital Health, formulated by an international interdisciplinary team of medical, academic, and industry experts at the Riyadh Global Digital Health Summit in August 2020, provided a set of digital health recommendations for the global health community to address the challenges of current and future pandemics. However, guidance is needed on how to implement these recommendations in practice. Objective: To develop guidance for stakeholders on how best to deploy digital health and data and support public health in an integrated manner to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics. Evidence Review: Themes were determined by first reviewing the literature and Riyadh Global Digital Health Summit conference proceedings, with experts independently contributing ideas. Then, 2 rounds of review were conducted until all experts agreed on the themes and main issues arising using a nominal group technique to reach consensus. Prioritization was based on how useful the consensus recommendation might be to a policy maker. Findings: A diverse stakeholder group of 13 leaders in the fields of public health, digital health, and health care were engaged to reach a consensus on how to implement digital health recommendations to address the challenges of current and future pandemics. Participants reached a consensus on high-priority issues identified within 5 themes: team, transparency and trust, technology, techquity (the strategic development and deployment of technology in health care and health to achieve health equity), and transformation. Each theme contains concrete points of consensus to guide the local, national, and international adoption of digital health to address challenges of current and future pandemics. Conclusions and Relevance: The consensus points described for these themes provide a roadmap for the implementation of digital health policy by all stakeholders, including governments. Implementation of these recommendations could have a significant impact by reducing fatalities and uniting countries on current and future battles against pandemics.

IT support in emergency remote teaching in response to COVID-19.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic hit the German education system unexpectedly and forced its universities to shift to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). The Data Integration Center (DIC) of the University Hospital Magdeburg and the Institute of Biometry and Medical Informatics (IBMI) has developed a concept based on existing structures that can be quickly implemented and used by the Medical Faculty at Otto von Guericke University. This manuscript focuses on the IT support for lecturers, which allows them to concentrate on teaching their lessons, although the authors are aware that this is only a small part of the entire subject. Additionally, there is a great awareness that ERT can never replace well-structured in-person classes. Concept: The key feature of the concept uses the well-working management system for all physical rooms of the university by designing a virtual video conference room for every physical room. This allows high interactivity for lectures and seminars while applying proven teaching methods. Additionally, a collaboration software system to document all lessons learned and a technical support team have been available for the teaching staff. Courses with a hands-on approach require more personal interaction than lectures. Therefore, the issues of practical trainings have not been solved with this concept, but been tackled by using questionnaires and minimizing contacts during attestations. Applied IT tools: The concept's requirements were met by Zoom Meetings, Confluence, HIS/LSF and Moodle. Discussion and Conclusion: The concept helped the lecturers to provide high-quality teaching for students at universities. Additionally, it allows for a dynamic response to new needs and problems. The concept will be reviewed as part of a higher Universal Design for Learning concept and may support lecturers in the following semesters in hybrid meetings with real and virtual attendees.

Digital PCR is a sensitive new technique for SARS-CoV-2 detection in clinical applications.

The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has posed great challenges in people's daily lives. Highly sensitive laboratory techniques played a critical role in clinical COVID-19 diagnosis and management. In this study the feasibility of using a new digital PCR-based detection assay for clinical COVID-19 diagnosis was investigated by comparing its performance with that of RT-PCR. Clinical patient samples and samples obtained from potentially contaminated environments were analyzed. The study included 10 patients with confirmed COVID-19 diagnoses, 32 validated samples of various types derived from different clinical timepoints and sites, and 148 environmentally derived samples. SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acids were more readily detected in respiratory tract samples (35.0%). In analyses of environmentally derived samples, the positivity rate of air samples was higher than that of surface samples, probably due to differences in virus concentrations. Digital PCR detected SARS-CoV-2 in several samples that had previously been deemed negative, including 3 patient-derived samples and 5 environmentally derived samples. In this study digital PCR exhibited higher sensitivity than conventional RT-PCR, suggesting that it may be a useful new method for clinical SARS-CoV-2 detection. Improvement of SARS-CoV-2 detection would substantially reduce the rates of false-negative COVID-19 test results, in particular those pertaining to asymptomatic carriers.