Digital Technology and Healthy Aging
By Julie Viola, Philips Healthcare and Chair, GCOA Digital Health Working Group
While it feels like digital health is everywhere, our world can still do more to unlock its peak value — for people’s well-being, for health equity, and for inclusive prosperity. As the tech and healthcare industries, health systems, and global citizens pursue these solutions, the Global Coalition on Aging’s Digital Health Working Group is bringing the lens of healthy aging to digital health and enabling innovations for the more than 1 billion older people worldwide.
The World Health Organization gave a great synopsis of the status of digital health: “Digital technologies are now integral to daily life, and the world’s population has never been more interconnected. Innovation, particularly in the digital sphere, is happening at unprecedented scale. Even so, its application to improve the health of populations remains largely untapped, and there is immense scope for use of digital health solutions.”
Indeed, the WHO and UN’s own Decade of Healthy Ageing is itself a framework for action to advance technology-based health solutions that will enable healthier aging. And, the timing, too, as we learn from and emerge from the Covid-19 global pandemic.
The aforementioned is why we, the Digital Health Working Group, come together as part of GCOA. We believe our ideas, strategies, and actions — shared across companies, industries, and country borders — will help speed innovation, expand access, and improve healthcare.
We aim to pursue the most immediate opportunities for impact, collaborate, and start to execute on programs and initiatives. Currently, we are considering health education, access, and bringing down barriers to equity in tech, a goal we expect is fully aligned with the UN’s own Digital Inclusion strategy and the ITU dedication of this years’ World Information Day to Older Persons. In parallel, we are also assessing clunky and gnarly problems that have persisted over decades: interoperability of data for middle-aged and older adults, global regulations for a global economy, and bridging financial health with healthcare to look at people’s health holistically.
This year, we look to build on the exciting progress we made in 2021. Our working group will home in on key topics that surround the United Nations and World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) initiatives on the Decade of Healthy Ageing and the silver economy. We will also bring it to real solutions for people — better and earlier assessment of osteoporosis to avoid that first fracture and better treat the second. More effective monitoring of CVD that we are certain will lead to wellness, prevention, and treatment strategies that will not have to wait for that first acute event where one winds up in the hospital. Bringing high tech to high touch as our homes become the 21st century “hospitals.” Or how innovative digital technology can collect data and prompt better compliance/adherence for often forgotten and overlooked adult immunization.
With innovation happening at a pace never seen before, and health disparities being uncovered with more conviction, the time to collaborate and deliver meaningful digital health solutions has never been better. Working together, we can build digital health solutions for today’s older adults, which, in time, will be built into the normal way of life for our children and grandchildren.
