Wilton Park Dialogue: The promises of digital health to tackle NCDs

Wilton Park Dialogue: The promises of digital health to tackle NCDs 

25 November 2019 - Wiston House, Steyning, UK

Good afternoon.
It is a pleasure to be here with you today at the invitation of Wilton Park to discuss the promise of digital health, and how we can work together to realize that promise. I am pleased to be joined on this panel with two medical experts, Anushka Patel from The George Institute for Global Health and Virginia Arnold from WHO, an organization with which ITU has a long history of collaboration.

There are many exciting advances in digital health that offer tremendous potential benefits, in particular in diagnosing non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Take Parkinson’s disease as an example. An application powered by artificial intelligence developed by Tencent is currently under clinical trial in London.  In less than three minutes it could diagnose people living with the disease. The technology promises to make this complicated diagnosis with just a smartphone directly from the patient’s home, thanks to today’s smartphone cameras being able to capture and transmit images and video of the necessary quality.

It is early days, but these advances in data mining and artificial intelligence hold great promise for the healthcare industry. It is why ITU and WHO joined forces last year to launch an initiative to leverage the power of artificial intelligence for health. The demand for this initiative was identified at ITU’s AI for Good Global Summit, whose objective is to generate new AI projects that can accelerate progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. An ITU Focus Group on “AI for Health” was formed and has studied AI use cases, in particular for NCDs.

The Focus Group is open to all interested parties and brings together researchers, engineers, practitioners, entrepreneurs and policy makers to work towards the standardization of a framework for benchmarking ‘AI for Health’ algorithms - an approval process similar to that for pharmaceuticals and medical devices. The idea is to provide regulators with the information necessary to determine whether or not these algorithms have proved themselves accurate enough to enter clinical settings.

The purpose of ITU standards is to ensure interoperability, open up global markets, reduce costs through economies of scale and avoid being locked into proprietary standards. Artificial intelligence relies on access to large amounts of relevant data, but this will only be possible if the databases comply with international standards. Sadly, this is not always the case. I have had ministers of health visiting ITU complaining about the lack of interoperability of the databases even within their own country.

This is why the report of the Broadband Commission’s working group on digital health, which was chaired by Ann Aerts, rightly identifies interoperability as one of the building blocks for sustainable digital health. The report was launched in September 2018 and provides practical recommendations and best practices on how policy makers can use readily available digital technology to address NCDs.

Of course, it is essential to have industry input to the development of these technical standards and that it why WHO is working closely with ITU, as ITU’s membership includes over 600 private sector companies. We also have over 160 universities as members who also contribute to the technical work. We recently launched the first technical standard developed in ITU to the requirements identified by WHO - to protect children’s and young peoples hearing from listening to music too loudly on their smartphones.

ITU’s collaboration with WHO goes back many years, and when the ubiquity of mobile phones and mobile networks (covering more than 95% of the world’s population) was recognised back in 2012 as a way to reach out to nearly everyone on the planet, ITU and WHO created the ITU-WHO mHealth for NCD initiative, known as Be He@lthy, Be Mobile, to deliver advice to millions through their mobile phones. This initiative has raised more the US$10 million for projects, including a project with the European Commission to establish an mHealth Innovation Hub in Europe.

Over the past five years, the initiative has accomplished significant reach and impact, supporting 16 programmes in 12 countries and reaching over 3.7 million users. Toolkits and content libraries provide guidance on NCDs and the planning, implementation and evaluation of national mHealth programmes. The initiative partners with UN agencies, private sector, academia, governments and civil society and we are now planning the strategy for phase 2 which includes expanding the reach to at least 100 million people, further developing the content library and increasing the number of partnerships. Virginia Arnold and Sameer Pujari are part of the project team and will be able to present more details later.

ITU standards also support wearable e-health technologies such as blood pressure cuffs and glucose monitors as well as a wide range of activity trackers and devices helping with chronic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

ITU’s core function is to maintain the international treaty on the use of the radio spectrum and satellite orbits - known as the Radio Regulations. Today, just over half of the world’s population is connected to the Internet and most of those are connected through their phone. Spectrum management is essential to ensure efficient use of this scares resource and to avoid harmful interference between the different wireless devices and services. Most of the unconnected people live in rural, remote and isolated communities which are difficult to serve due to terrain or poor return on investment. Connecting these people is essential to achieve universal health coverage.

Last week the ITU’s World Radiocommunication Conference concluded its work in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt on updating the Radio Regulations. It provides for some exciting new opportunities for bringing new services and connectivity to the world such as 5G, but also low earth-orbiting satellite networks and high-altitude platforms stations that have the potential to bring low cost connectivity to the rural and remote areas.

Bringing affordable connectivity to people in these areas is essential if the Sustainable Development Goals are to be achieved, including SDG 3 - health and well-being for all.

So let me conclude by saying that ITU is keen to partner with all interested parties, especially the medical community, in this important endeavour to bring the benefits of the digital revolution to address the scourge on NCDs and I look forward to discussing with you how we can better collaborate to do so.

Thank you.