Observatory Venice Summer School 2021

Digital health: towards a post-pandemic future

Online event, 26-30 July 2021

While digital health has been identified and advocated for as an important issue for quite some time, its actual implementation has been slow in many, if not most European countries. The potential of digital health is thus not being fully utilised for improving health care, health research and health systems. The COVID-19 pandemic means that this is rapidly changing, but ideas, plans, reforms and actual implementation are possibly not coherent across countries – with definite potential to learn from each other.

This Observatory Summer School will therefore address the question “How can digital health tools help European health systems achieve their objectives, in particular during and after the COVID-19 pandemic?”

This Summer School will explore the status of digital health tools in Europe before the pandemic, how digital health has been evolving, the potential that it offers, the challenges involved, and how these were – and are being – addressed. We will look at how digital health tools have been used during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what can be learned about how to build on the greater use of digital health tools during the pandemic to make best use of digital health tools in the future. As well as providing an overview of issues, we will explore these in more depth through three specific uses of digital health:

● How digital health tools can provide information for policy and practice, including how digital health tools have contributed to monitoring the pandemic and responding to it;

● How digital health tools are changing the provision of healthcare, including the increased use of digital health during the pandemic to continue providing health services in different ways; and,

● How he emerging contribution of digital health tools such as machine learning to research and learning, including novel applications during the pandemic.

At this pivotal time, with European health systems shaping their strategies for the future after the pandemic, this Observatory Summer School offers participants the opportunity to learn about the challenges of digital health, to gain insight into the developments in this field including innovations during the pandemic, and to consider key strategies for the longer term to make the best use of digital health tools. 

Veneto Region Session