‘Serious Games’ for unboxing Global Digital Health policymaking

The news headlines report daily on the global political impacts of digital technology: the secondary use of social media data has been implicated in election meddling, though the complex issues surrounding data governance, data ownership and the ethics of personalised advertising remain to be addressed. Meanwhile, digital automation drives unemployment and income inequality, even as the global digital divide exacerbates discrepancies in access. The WHO’s ‘Global strategy on Digital Health’ outlines a vision of ‘Global Digital Health’ (GDH), calling for partnerships, networks, public goods and a research agenda for engineering the ‘GDH ecosystem’. As policymakers consider the political implications of the digital age with suspicion and caution, what are the repercussions for realising GDH? While GDH necessitates technical innovations such as interoperability standards, it also requires ‘social innovations’ for ensuring that the digital revolution meets its social objectives.1 Participatory methodologies (eg, citizen engagement, co-design, co-production) can play a key role in ensuring that social risks are pre-empted and prevented, or identified early and resolved.2 Emerging examples of civic technology supporting digital democracy include participatory governance platforms like vTaiwan (info.vtaiwan.tw), Decide Madrid (decide.madrid.es) and CitizenLab (www.citizenlab.co). Similarly, participatory approaches could be used to prevent policy challenges from stalling progress towards GDH, by enabling a deeper and wider understanding of the processes …