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Friday March 29, 2024

‘Innovations, changing ecosystems creating opportunities to improve human health’

By Shahina Maqbool
December 08, 2017
Islamabad: Even though we are living in a world marked by profound health challenges, technology’s boundless healthcare applications make it entirely possible for governments to join the dots, layer things up, and reimagine health to address issues of equity, quality, cost, and efficiency.
Heartfile President Dr. Sania Nishtar made these remarks while sharing her vision about the future of health as keynote speaker at the opening of the 8th Annual Public Health Conference organised by the Health Services Academy (HSA). Dr. Sania wears many hats, but relevant to the subject of ‘future of health,’ is her position as Chair of the ‘World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda think tank on the Future of Health,’ which is a great honour for Pakistan.
In her visionary keynote speech, Dr. Sania set out the context by referring to the challenges that the world faces today. “Conflicts, one of the largest migration waves in history, humanitarian crises, demographic challenges, epidemiological shifts and the threats of climate change, loom large. In such a context, there are also profound health challenges -- rising costs, the demands of an ageing population, and widening inequities. In fact, some of the global health challenges threaten to wipe out the development gains of the last century -- threats such as a potential pandemic, antimicrobial resistance and the rising burden of non-communicable diseases,” she stated.
Dr. Sania then moved on to highlight how technology and digitisation are revolutionising everything. “The future of health is being shaped by many transformative forces -- innovations and changing ecosystems are creating an unprecedented opportunity to improve human health and wellbeing,” she pointed out.
Elaborating her viewpoint, Dr. Sania said, “Today, predictive analytics could provide a solution for developing a pandemic reporting system. Billions of people are connected with mobile devices -- where the combination of processing power, knowledge access and data portability converge and could open myriad opportunities for improving health. Artificial intelligence can overcome constraints posed by critical workers shortages in many parts of the world. Block chain can help overcome interoperability challenges in health IT systems and enable us to address clinical errors, wastage and fraud. With machine learning capabilities -- and with recent watershed events in tabular learning, and algorithmic breakthroughs as evidenced by the launch of AlphaGo Zero, most recently, technology’s healthcare applications are potentially boundless. It is entirely possible to join the dots, layer things up and reimagine health to address issues of equity, quality, cost and efficiency.”
Dr. Sania then emphasised that in order to “tap the potential of these emerging transformations, they have to be deployed in systems, with the right incentives structures. This requires another layer of expertise or complex systems experts. Governments have an important normative role to play here. They need capacity and vision to develop standards and create new regulatory systems. For the health sector, where human knowledge and intervention matters deeply, this has huge implications in terms of realigning education training and capacity building.” As with all of her speeches, she stressed the importance of transparency and accountability as being central tenets of governance effectiveness.
Dr. Sania believes that the Sustainable Development (SDG) agenda has ushered in a new era compared to what was the norm in the past. The emphasis is now on strengthening country institutions, she said, so that international actors can focus on areas where they have a comparative advantage. “The systemic interlinkages between the economic, social and environmental determinants of sustainable development require a profound change from the existing sectorial view of health,” she added. Dr. Sania stressed that health is a multi-sectoral responsibility. As examples, she cited that “over 9 million people die annually due to the effects of air pollution; millions live with the consequences of obesity; road traffic accidents are the greatest burden of mortality in the younger generation; and income and female education are the strongest determinants of health status achievement.”
Speaking on the occasion, Minister for Health Services Saira Afzal Tarar said Pakistan is fully committed to achieving the health-related SDGs. She then shared Pakistan’s achievement in various health domains including polio eradication, drug pricing, and the national health insurance programme -- a social protection initiative providing financial protection to families against out-of-pocket expenditure on health. “Thousands of poor patients have benefitted from treatment facilities including deliveries, cardiac surgeries, cancer and other major diseases in the best private and government hospitals in their districts, without spending a single rupee. After the success of phase 1, the government will launch the second phase of this programme in order to expand this safety net. We are committed to expand this programme till every poor citizen of this country is benefitted,” she stated. The minister thanked the provincial health ministers and Departments for their commitment to health sector interventions.