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.

Risk-based regulatory system and its effective use in health and social care.

The regulatory landscape of the health and adult social care system in England is constantly changing. The establishment of a new regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), will help to integrate the regulation of the health and adult social care sector together and strengthen the safety and quality assurance for patients and service users. It will have the challenge of regulating a much bigger sector and wider variety of organizations than its predecessor bodies--i.e. Healthcare Commission, Commission for Social Care Inspection and Mental Health Act Commission. An effective and efficient regulatory approach is needed by the new regulator to achieve the objectives, without increasing the regulatory burden on the services. A risk-based regulatory approach may help to deal with those challenges by proactively identifying and assessing any key risks to the quality and safety of these services. There are a number of perceived benefits of adapting such a risk-based approach by the regulator, both in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, as experienced by many other regulators in the UK and abroad.