Digitizing health data for public health protection in the context of European and international coordination.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The health sector has long been affected by programs, actions, plans to digitize data and care processes with a view to better protecting individual health, as well as public health, resulting in a slow and uneven development of different and often incompatible national services. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to explore the grounds behind the urgency of turning the digital priority into concrete actions, as acknowledged by political leaders in the Rome Declaration, by explaining the capacity of digital tools to enhance healthcare management and the current obstacles. METHODS: It considers the progressive extension of the EU institutions' scope of action during the pandemic, the related supporting financial strategies launched and some examples of digital contact tracing systems. RESULTS: It emerged that the pandemic highlighted the inadequacy of purely national policies and the advantages of leveraging the digital health data processing for governance, surveillance and response to cross-border and global threats. CONCLUSIONS: Considering what emerged during the pandemic and the solemn commitment of the world's major political leaders, the solution to the still existing technical and organizational interoperability issues will no longer be postponed.