Digital technologies hold great promise for improving the delivery of health services and helping countries to progress towards universal health coverage. This report summarizes initial systematic work to make the economic case for implementing a set of evidence-based digital health interventions for NCD prevention and management, including telemedicine, mobile health and health chatbots. It also highlights the importance of improving access to relevant digital tools and infrastructure.

Going Digital in Brazil analyses recent developments in Brazil’s digital economy, reviews policies related to digitalisation and makes recommendations to increase policy coherence in this area.

Noncommunicable Diseases: A Compendium introduces readers to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) – what they are, their burden, their determinants and how they can be prevented and controlled. Focusing on cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and chronic respiratory disease and their five shared main risk factors (tobacco use, harmful use of alcohol, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity and air pollution) as defined by the United Nations, this book provides a synopsis of one of the world’s biggest challenges of the 21st century. NCDs prematurely claim the lives of millions of people across the world every year, with untold suffering to hundreds of millions more, trapping many people in poverty and curtailing economic growth and sustainable development. While resources between and within countries largely differ, the key principles of surveillance, prevention and management apply to all countries, as does the need to focus resources on the most cost-effective and affordable interventions and the need for strong political will, sufficient resources, and sustained and broad partnerships. This compendium consists of 59 short and accessible chapters in six sections: (i) describing and measuring the burden and impact of NCDs; (ii) the burden, epidemiology and priority interventions for individual NCDs; (iii) social determinants and risk factors for NCDs and priority interventions; (iv) global policy; (v) cross-cutting issues; and (vi) stakeholder action. Drawing on the expertise of a large and diverse team of internationally renowned policy and academic experts, the book describes the key epidemiologic features of NCDs and evidence-based interventions in a concise manner that will be useful for policymakers across all parts of society, as well as for public health and clinical practitioners.

In 2011, heads of state and government at the United Nations General Assembly formally acknowledged that NCDs are one of the major challenges to development and committed to integrate NCD prevention and control into other programmes, such as for HIV and broader maternal and child health programmes, especially in PHC. The commitment to integrate NCDs into existing disease programmes was reaffirmed again through its NCD resolutions at its Third High-level Meeting in 2018. This guidance outlines strategic actions and practical solutions in response to the challenges of integration of NCDs, as appropriate and relevant to the country context. The objective is to maximize the impact of health services and extend access to NCD care. The target readership is policymakers, programme managers and health providers. The guidance should also be useful for WHO and international partners (including donors and banks) that champion integrated support for NCD service delivery in countries and better management.

Noncommunicable disease facility-based monitoring guidance: Framework, indicators, and application provides the indicators needed for NCD facility-based patient and programme monitoring at primary care level. The purpose of this document is to improve availability and quality of NCD healthcare and to enhance healthcare professionals’ performance on early detection, screening, treatment, and complication assessment in primary healthcare for cardiovascular diseases including hypertension, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, and cancer. Key target audiences are health facility providers and managers, along with international partners, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, civil society, and academic institutions, who are engaged with NCD healthcare provision in primary healthcare

The immense increase on the size and type of real time data generated across various edge computing platform results in unstructured databases and data silos. This edited book gathers together an international set of researchers to investigate the possibilities offered by data-fabric solutions; the volume focuses in particular on data architectures and on semantic changes in future data landscapes.

Nurses and midwives must increasingly work in multi-disciplinary teams and engage with patients to navigate the data and information central to today’s digitally-driven healthcare system. This book presents the proceedings of NI 2021, the 15th International Congress in Nursing Informatics. Originally planned to be held in 2020, the international year of the nurse and midwife, but postponed due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the conference, with the theme of nursing and midwifery in the digital age, was eventually held as a virtual event from 23 August to 2 September 2021, and the organizers made the decision to take advantage of its virtual nature and extend it to 9 days, with each day focusing on a different theme. This is reflected in the organization of the book, and the 212 papers included here, of which 67 are full papers with the remainder being workshop, panel, case study, and poster abstracts, are grouped into 9 sections. The papers were selected from a total of 437 submissions from more than 40 countries and cover: data analytics and the use of nursing data; digital health nursing workforce development; health policy, service delivery and ethics; informatics in clinical care; innovation and entrepreneurship in nursing; integrated and connected care; nursing information systems; patient participation and citizen involvement; and systems implementation and digital workplaces. Highlighting developments in nursing and midwifery and the way in which nurses and midwives are embracing the digital age, the book will be of interest to all those involved in healthcare today.

Public health guidelines and policies relating to digital public health are essential to ensuring the protection of the population. With this protection, there needs to be a consideration for the ethical challenges in public health. There is an obligation of care that comes with accessing health services, as well as a need for understanding the role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. As health challenges become more complex, there is a growing need to identify and address questions on existing public health policies, codes of conduct, and guidelines relating to the provision of medical care across the globe, in order to strengthen our understanding of the ethics of public health practices.