Digital Health Maturity: Quality, Interoperability, and Innovation

Emeritus Professor Liaw MBBS, FRACGP, PhD, GAICD is a clinician scientist and informatician who uses mixed methodologies to research digital health, focusing on electronic decision support, mHealth, data quality & interoperability and ethical, legal & social issues. He has sustained international collaborations on his digital health program in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and America. He is a Fellow, American College of Medical Informatics (2012) and Founding Fellow, Australasian College of Health Informatics (2002), Australian Institute of Digital Health (2018), and International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (2017). He chairs/co-chairs of the IMIA Primary Care Informatics WG and is a board member of the IAHSI. As Head, WHO Collaborating Centre on eHealth (AUS-135), he assisted WHO member states, especially low- & middle-income countries (LMIC), with digital health maturity metamodel (DHM3) based approaches to implement and sustain national digital health programs to achieve universal health coverage, safe and cost-effective integrated person-centered health services and community development. He has published extensively in the health informatics, general practice & integrated primary care disciplines.

Dr Jonnagaddala is an academic in Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. He is a medically trained doctor with an undergraduate degree in engineering, a master’s in information systems, and a PhD in medicine. His research focuses on the secondary use of routinely collected electronic health records (EHRs) through the lens of digital health maturity. He has several years of experience in various medical and digital health roles in Singapore, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. He has and continues to lead several research projects in collaboration with national and international partners such as WHO, UNICEF, and ADB.

Dr Godinho is a Research Fellow at the Westmead Applied Research Centre, University of Sydney. He has a background in clinical medicine and 8 years of experience in health research & teaching, and is an Associate Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (AFAIDH), and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA, UK Professional Standards Framework). His research focuses on Digital Health in clinical applications (cardiometabolic health), in health organisations (social enterprises), and in Global Health (Digital Health Diplomacy). Graduating in 2022 from the Scientia PhD Scholar program at the University of New South Wales, his doctoral research focused on how social enterprises can utilise digital health and citizen engagement interventions to implement the WHO Integrated People-Centered Health Services framework. This comprises an ongoing program of work on Digital Health in Social Entrepreneurship for population-level health and social impact, for which he is also an invited speaker and mentor providing technical, management, and leadership support at several social entrepreneurship programs. As a member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for eHealth at UNSW, his work focuses on the novel area of ‘Digital Health Diplomacy’ for facilitating global socio-technical interoperability in digital health systems. He has also organised and conducted Model WHO conferences across several countries to encourage emerging health professionals to address persisting global health issues.

Dr Wilkins-Wong is an Associate Professor at St. Luke’s International University in Tokyo, Japan, and an adjunct/honorary academic at UNSW Sydney, University of Sydney and University of Hong Kong. She believes smart utilization of AI and digital technologies will lead to the betterment of human health. Dr Wong has more than a decade of research experience spanning across areas of digital health policy, methods, design, and evaluation. Having published over 80+ scholarly articles, editorials, and conference proceedings, she has pioneered and assessed a range of population health-centric algorithms, frameworks, and interventions, many of which have been subsequently cited to influence policy development by the WHO, UN, and EU. She is currently the Principal Investigator of a UNICEF funded project on Technical Experts on Digital Health Interventions. Leading a team of academics and industrial partners, the UNICEF initiative aims to improve children’s health through eHealth innovations.