The World Health Organization (WHO) on 20 February launched the Global Initiative on Digital Health (GIDH) virtually, a platform for sharing knowledge and digital products among countries.
- It was one of the three priority areas agreed upon during India’s G20 presidency in 2023.
Key points
- The Global Initiative on Digital Health (GIDH) is a WHO managed network of stakeholders organized to facilitate the implementation of the Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020-2025 and other WHO norms and standards for Digital Health System Transformation.
- The Initiative will serve as a platform to enable a wide global ecosystem to work collectively to promote country capacity and strengthen international cooperation in digital health.
- The initiative will be a network of networks with four main components — country needs tracker, country resource portal (a map of resources available in a country), transformation toolbox that will share quality-assured digital tools, and knowledge exchange.
- The platform will help in democratising digital health technologies, especially for countries of the Global South.
- GIDH will support countries in three ways – by listening to their needs, by aligning resources to avoid fragmentation and overlap, and by providing quality assured products.
