Global Digital Health Partnership

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India and the World Health Organization co-hosted the International Digital Health Symposium in New Delhi as part of the 4th summit of the Global Digital Health Partnership. The Symposium served as a learning forum for key global leaders in the field of digital health and innovation.

As part of the academic panels, the Ministry invited key faculty speakers from the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Attendees included global leaders and innovators in health information systems, industry representatives as well as senior health officials from over 30 partner countries.

Dr. John Quackenbush, Henry Walcott Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and Chair, Department of Biostatistics

Dr. John Quackenbush provided insights on “Personalised Precision Medicine: Genomics and Beyond” where he spoke about the role of biomarkers in targeted therapy; disease progression and precision care. Dr. Quackenbush highlighted the need to study multi-level patient data and the relationship between genomic, radiomic and clinical domains.


Dr. Tianxi Cai, John Rock Professor of Population and Translational Data Sciences

Dr. Tianxi Cai spoke about the capacity constraints in utilisation of health data and the way forward during the Roundtable on “Health Data for decisions – Research Priorities”. Dr. Cai spoke about the importance of developing various models for data utilisation in healthcare systems and the need for information sharing across different contexts.

 


Dr. Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Associate Professor of Biostatistics

Dr. Jukka-Pekka Onnela in his panel on “Public Health Surveillance” introduced the audience to the concept of digital phenotyping and its application in collecting active and passive data of populations, such as GPS, call logs and accelometer. Furthermore, Dr. Onnela explained how this data can be used for quantification of the individual-level human phenotype with an applied focus on psychiatric and neurological disorders.