2 days Ago By jfinison
LAS VEGAS - At the 2025 HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition here, Herko Coomans, international digital health coordinator at the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, highlighted the work of the Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP) worldwide and the aim of the organization. During his talk , "Digital Health Policy Collaboration on a Global Scale with the GDHP," Coomans said, "Every country that we talk with and that we meet shares similar challenges. "It is about how to enable our workforce to use technology in an efficient way.
It is about how to ensure that technology is interoperable and data can flow from one end of the system to the next," Coomans said. Challenges are similar in different countries and across borders, especially with the aging society and the pressure of costs on healthcare, he said. Technology is actively breaking down those borders, and the abundance of data is at the core of digital health, both local and international, Coomans said.
Global digital health vendors work in infectious disease management, population health management, life sciences and health research, interoperability standards, and cross-border care and data exchange. "There are diseases that do not look at our maps and see where our borders are and just stop being infectious at the border," Coomans said. We have a unique window of opportunity, he said.
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a significant sense of urgency, as was proven when health systems failed to deliver when pressure was rising. "Digital is one of the key elements to make our health systems more resilient," he said. Because of that, Coomans said, funding for digital health increased, and there was a focus on digital health infrastructure to make countries more resilient.
"Many countries are embarking on a full system reform in their legislative packages, or how they fund their health system or how they govern their health system, and a lot of this includes digital health and data management," Coomans said. During the pandemic, technology proved to be both available and deployable at scale and was a large driver in the ability to continue care. "We have a responsibility together to leverage this technology," Coomans said.
"That is why international collaboration is important because when we work together and pool our resources, we can actually leverage those across borders. We are not just limited by the constraints that we put on ourselves because we only have nationalism, but because we have similar instruments, we can actually speed up and make it more efficient." In 2018, the Global Digital Health Partnership was formed, which focuses on global collaboration and knowledge-sharing while designing digital health services to support high-quality and sustainable healthcare.
GDHP's founding members include Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, the World Health Organization, and Hong Kong, China. It currently comprises 41 countries plus the WHO, representing over 40% of the global population and the WHO. "If things go well after this conference, it will not be long before we are at 50 members," Coomans said.
"[Members] are from all over the world. It is not just the Western countries or countries that we tend to think of as the most advanced in digital health." The diversity of the members is one of the core strengths of the collaboration, he said.
GDHP's purpose is to collaborate and share best practices to create guidance for other countries around digital health. "We also do a lot of creation," Coomans said. "There are five work streams that we have.
" The work streams, led by two or more co-chairs from different member countries, include policy environments, cybersecurity, interoperability, evidence and evaluation, and clinical and human engagement. "Everyone is looking at what kind of steps we need to take as governments to regulate or stimulate the right use of AI in our health systems," Coomans said. Instead of creating a framework for policy, the GDHP created a curriculum and many white papers for policy decision-makers to understand the technology and the context in which it is applied.
"It is good to know where the gaps are and how we compare to other countries because we tend to focus so much on what is happening in our own country that we forget that it is not a race. You don't have to be first in everything," Coomans said..
