Platform IV: Digital Health and Innovation

Leads: Zakiuddin Ahmed, Riphah International University & Syed Ahmar Shah, University of Edinburgh

Platform IV seeks to strengthen rapid innovation capacity among multiple stakeholders, including government, stakeholder and community engagement groups and academia, to enable the long-term sustained success of such initiatives.

People

The platform is co-led by:

• Dr Zakiuddin Ahmed, Project Director at the Riphah Institute of Healthcare Improvement and Safety,  Adjunct Professor of Digital Health at the Health Services Academy, CEO of Digital Health
• Monica Fletcher, OBE, Honorary Fellow University of Edinburgh

Jay Evans, based at the University of Edinburgh is RESIRE’s Digital Health and Innovation Research Fellow, and coordinates the activities of Platform IV. Jay is also a Teaching Fellow at the NHS Digital Academy, and Associate Researcher University of Copenhagen.

Laura Evans works with the team as RESPIRE’s Digital Health and Innovation Platform Support

Key activities

Digital health hub

The digital health hub is the central resource within Platform IV, which houses digital health capacity-building content for all RESPIRE 2 stakeholders, digital health interventions and projects from participating countries, information on funding opportunities and knowledge exchange, and acts as a communication portal for engagement and empowerment in native/national languages (the hub is currently in development).

Conceptualization, design, deployment, and sustainability support

Platform IV supports planned digital health innovations within the RESPIRE projects. Such support is provided at the requests of the partner countries and can range from supporting the innovation from inception to deployment and scale-up to ad hoc support.

Capacity building

Platform IV works to increase digital health knowledge through various channels, including webinars and capacity-building training programmes (webinars are ongoing, capacity-building programmes are in development).

Regional mapping of digital health innovations

Platform IV is undertaking a landscape mapping of current digital health innovations in partner countries so that strengths, opportunities, and gaps can be identified and upcoming innovations under RESPIRE can be more relevant and address know needs in the country/region.