The 4th UNGA Digital Health Symposium

Event Overview

We have made remarkable progress in health as a global society, more than doubling life expectancy in just over two centuries. Public health and clinical innovations have been major contributors to this improvement. But across the world, healthcare systems are facing a major crisis caused by a perfect storm of factors – rapidly rising healthcare costs, clinician burnout and attrition, and demographics going in the wrong direction. Since 2018, there are more people over 65 than under the age of five in the world. Equally half the world do not have access to affordable care and for the half that do, it is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Time magazine recently wrote about the coming collapse of the US healthcare system, and the New York Times published an opinion piece about how that doctors aren’t burnt out from overwork, but demoralised by a broken healthcare system. According to the WHO and the World Bank Half the world lacks access to essential health services, 100 million still pushed into extreme poverty because of health expenses.

Healthcare is stuck in a time warp. Adapting from Peter Drucker “Every Organization or indeed Industry needs a theory of the Business” and “a valid theory that is clear, consistent, and focused is extraordinarily powerful.” An example is Moore’s Law which set a competitive challenge for the collective semiconductor industry that drove alignment, amplification and acceleration for the entire industry and has created the engine to transform our world into a digital and perhaps the most sustainable one.

We proposed “Stay Left, Shift Left-10X as the Moore’s Law for the Healthcare Industry. Stay Left is about first keeping well people well or if you need rehab or have a chronic disease this can be done best of all from home. Shift Left is about getting patients as quickly as possible from Hospital to Community to Home. 10X is the notion that when digital technologies are applied to health, we can do things 10X better, faster, cheaper and higher volume.

In 2021, the first Digital Health Symposium produced a white paper ‘The Digital Transition for Healthcare’ based on the “Stay Left, Shift Left, 10X” strategy outlining the need, rationale, and benefits for doing this with fifteen global co-authors. In 2022 the second Digital Health Symposium co-created the ‘Manhattan Manifesto’ including 12 guidelines for governments and organizations for achieving digital health equity, signed by fifty collaborators. In 2024, the 4th Digital Health Symposium will focus on moving from “Ambition to Action” and creating plans for alignment, amplification, and acceleration of our collective efforts to achieve health and wellbeing for all at all ages.