A new consortium to take forward the Governing Health Futures 2030 Commission’s recommendations
In October 2021, the Lancet and Financial Times Commission on Governing Health Futures 2030: Growing up in a digital world published a report calling for stronger digital and data governance to improve young people’s health and well-being and support achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
To continue the Commission’s work, and accelerate implementation of its recommendations, a global consortium called the Digital Transformations for Health Lab (DTH-Lab) has been established by many of the Commission’s original members and partners.
The DTH-Lab’s work will focus on three priority areas identified by the Commission:
- Promoting digital first health systems that are co-designed and governed by young people, are responsive to their health needs, and strengthen digital health citizenship.
- Providing governments, technology companies and other stakeholders with guidance on how to build a trusted and inclusive governance architecture based on data solidarity and Health for All values.
- Generating evidence and engaging governments, technology companies, youth organisations and other key actors to address the digital determinants of health.
The DTH-Lab will continue the Commission’s portfolio of research and analysis whilst at the same time establishing partnerships with youth, policymakers, technology companies and other actors to co-design and test governance solutions, particularly in low and middle-income countries in Africa and Asia with large youth populations. It will achieve its goals through a multidisciplinary approach that combines cutting edge research, strengthening youth leadership, driving innovations in policy and practice, and shifting public and political agendas.
Building on the Commission’s approach, the DTH-Lab will continue to promote youth leadership and support a generation of informed and enfranchised digital health citizens. Youth will be part of the Lab’s governance and play a major role in designing and testing solutions that will improve the health and well-being of future generations.
The establishment of the DTH-Lab is being made possible by a 3.5 year grant from Fondation Botnar. The Lab will be hosted at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Medicine and based at Campus Biotech. Teams based at Ashoka University in India and PharmAccess Foundation in Nigeria will lead the DTH-Lab’s research and programmes in low and middle-income countries with large populations of young people.
An event to launch the DTH-Lab will be held in October at the World Health Summit in Berlin. During the event, partners at the University of Vienna will present PLUTO, an online tool to assess the public value of data use.
Find out more about the DTH-Lab
