Digital health policy principles

Digital health encompasses a variety of terms, including e-health, m-health and telehealth, and has the potential to optimize care delivery, better inform health decisions and improve patient health outcomes. From the biopharmaceutical industry’s perspective, digital health is the convergence of advanced information and communications technologies (ICT) with public health, clinical research, diagnostics, health services delivery, education and information dissemination through secure digital channels.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of accelerating the digitalization of health systems, as well as the need to have appropriate policies and resources that enable equitable reach of digital health benefits. However, a coordinated response is necessary to ensure that the policies that are being discussed, tested and deployed to address today’s pandemic will continue to support sustainable, patient-centric health systems in the future—health systems that are prepared to address both infectious and chronic, noncommunicable diseases.

If implemented properly, digital health can support shared goals like UHC, improve global health security by minimizing the impact of events that endanger population health, and facilitate collaboration and innovation that drives patient-centred outcomes. To seize these opportunities, health systems stakeholders, including the biopharmaceutical industry, must overcome obstacles such as lack of fit-for-purpose healthcare policies, concerns over ethical and equitable access issues, and challenges with change management and health system transformation.

The biopharmaceutical industry recommends new policies and resources to deliver sustainable benefits for all from digital health. These include to build and implement digital health strategies and ecosystems; to develop adequate infrastructure and interoperability; to implement appropriate data governance, including cross-system and cross-border data flows; to enact appropriate regulatory and reimbursement pathways; to support collaborations and partnerships; to accelerate innovative R&D frameworks; and to provide sustainable financing and incentives.

Read the Biopharmaceutical Industry Global Policy Principles on Digital Health for more detailed information about the industry’s policy principles and how we hope to work together across stakeholders.