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The Digital Health community is growing. And it is thanks to conferences like #DH2018 in Lyon, that experts from related disciplines can exchange results, experience and ideas for future developments. Computer scientists, clinicians, nurses, public health specialists, behavioral scientists, epidemiologists, microbiologists and, yes, also philosophers, ethicists and legal experts have a stake in the field of Digital Health.
One of the first invitations that I accepted after staring up Transmissible in June 2016, is to become co-chair of the Digital Health Conference, and join the team of Patty Kostkova, who has been promoting the field of digital health for over a decade. Starting with the eHealth conferences held in London (2008), Istanbul (2009), Casablanca (2010) and Malaga (2011), a next step was made to set up the Public Health in Digital Age Workshop. This workshop was held with WWW conference in Rio de Janeiro (2013) and Seoul (2014). In 2015, this was transformed to a full subconference on Digital Health, held under the WWW Conference in Florence (2015), in Montreal (2016) and independently in London (2017).
The aim of the Digital Health Conference is to bring together public health agencies (WHO, ECDC, CDC, PHE) and computer science and IT and MedTech industry to cross-fertilize ideas and drive this growing interdisciplinary field.
This year, in Lyon, we have set up a program around the theme "Emergency and Humanitarian Medicine". Addressing acute needs of natural and manmade disasters will leverage opportunities created by geo-located big data, mobile technology and crowdsourcing for improving resilience, early warning and response to disasters and emergencies.