Connection and innovation flourish at the Global Goods Innovators Summit
By: Alena Owen, Program Officer of Strategy & Advocacy, Digital Square, and Vrunda Rathod, Senior Program Officer of Partnerships, Digital Square
Global Goods Innovators Summit 2023
What happens when you bring together 115 global goods innovators, developers, implementers, and donors, for five days of “un-conferencing”? Relationships blossom, ideas are sparked, and problems turn into solutions. That’s exactly what happened last month at the Global Goods Innovators Summit (GGIS), which took place from May 29 through June 2, 2023 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Hosted by Digital Square, GGIS is an annual convening of the global goods community–a group of digital health experts representing over 50 organizations from around the world committed to advancing the development, adoption, and reuse of digital health tools known as global goods. The goal of the event was to provide members of the community with a forum through which to connect, learn, and further build the global goods ecosystem.
A first-of-its-kind event
Un-conferencing is a peer-to-peer learning format where the agenda is shaped—and led—by participants. The core tenants of un-conferencing are to be brave, experiment, and follow your passion. After being provided a skeleton agenda on the first day, participants suggested session topics that their peers then voted upon in the room. Throughout the week, conveners held equal responsibility for planning, facilitating, and participating in the 20+ sessions that ensued.
Exploring the “Three S’s”
Each day centered around one of three themes: standards and interoperability, security and data-privacy, and sustainability. We heard from participants in these areas on what is working and what they are struggling with and began to problem-solve in real time.
Standards and Interoperability
Open standards provide a common language and set of expectations to help achieve interoperability between systems. While global goods developers and implementers generally understand the importance of standards, participants shared challenges communicating the value proposition of standards to governments, ministries of health, and donors.
On days 1 and 2, we discussed how to validate and share lessons learned on how standards have been used to solve problems. For example, team members from OpenMRS, an electronic medical record system and global good, shared how they recently reduced their integration time from 2-3 months to 1.5 days by using the Health Level 7 (HL7) FHIR® (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) standard. To underscore their commitment to implement FHIR to ensure better interoperability between healthcare systems, they created the OpenMRS FHIR2 module, a freely available implementation guide for those interested in replicating the process.
This experience with OpenMRS is a prime example of the long-term value of standards, and one that can easily be adopted by global goods at minimal cost for maximum benefit. One standards expert in the room noted, “Standards cost you money up-front. But tomorrow, standards save you money in the costs and risks that you never run into again.”
Security and data-privacy
Data-privacy and security have long been an essential part of the healthcare system, as patient data is some of the most personal and private information that exists. However, ensuring patient data privacy and security is complex, ever-changing, and challenging. On Day 3, we aimed to understand the current state of global goods and their security protocols, along with the risks of not implementing them.
“Your security chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”
Digital Square’s Technical Security Architect, Nino Hares, opened the day by describing the role of cybersecurity in healthcare, and the stunned silence in the room spoke volumes. It became abundantly clear that cybersecurity is an issue that is rarely discussed yet lives at the forefront of every technologist’s mind. As Nino emphasized, security must be considered at the onset of a project to save costs and adequately protect data from threats. To do that, global goods need, at minimum, written compliance guidance, the ability to conduct security self-assessments, and funding to strengthen security capacity among staff.
Sustainability
Digital health tools require steady funds to maintain and grow their product. This includes everything from ensuring that the core technology remains up to date, to adding new features, to ensuring staff are adequately trained on the tool. Digital health stakeholders have varied understanding of the actual cost of maintaining and implementing global goods, and this misalignment has the potential to hinder progress.
Day 4 was an opportunity for donors and global good stewards to speak candidly about the challenges of providing and procuring “core funding”—funding that supports the non-technical elements of product development—which is critical to global goods’ success. For example, things like cybersecurity preparedness and response, marketing and communications, strengthening community engagement and translation of documentation into multiple languages. Conversations throughout the day revealed that achieving sustainability in digital health is not about a singular solution, but rather a paradigm shift in the way digital tools are funded, built, deployed, and scaled. As one participant put it, “ensuring sustainability of global goods isn’t about one or two actions – it’s about changing mindsets.”
We heard from a group of local entrepreneurs receiving grants from the Digital Health Ecosystem (DHE) project, an innovative partnership between the Bayer Foundation, PATH, and Medic, and a prime example of how a collective mindset change is possible. Speakers shared how the DHE project provides them with access to the assistance they need to scale and sustain their tools, whether in the form of funding, product development, or design, and all within a community of people working on similar challenges who are willing to share solutions. This promising illustration of sustainability at the local level reverberated throughout the day and resonated with donors and implementers alike.
Moving from consultation to action
We closed out the summit on day 5 by summarizing the key learnings from the week and asking ourselves: what is required to put these ideas into practice? In short: more frequent communication, better documentation, and ongoing knowledge sharing among the global goods community outside of a single event. This means capturing and sharing stories of the tangible impact global goods are having on health outcomes. It means documenting things like security assessments and interoperability workflows and sharing what works—and, importantly, what doesn’t work—when implementing them. And it means not just more funding, but more informed funding that fits the core needs of global goods.
As the steward of the global goods community, Digital Square is committed to helping these words become actions. At Digital Square, we have the honor and responsibility of advocating for both global goods and the donors who fund them. There is a clear opportunity for us to showcase the learnings captured during the summit and share them with a wide audience so that the entire digital health community can benefit from the great work being done by its members.
A bright future for global goods
The Global Goods Innovators Summit promised an opportunity for passionate people to work together on complicated problems, and it delivered on that promise. The unconference format unlocked an openness and sense of ownership among attendees which is rarely found in events of similar size and scale. What’s more, it allowed the global goods community to grow stronger through candid and intimate discussions, genuine relationship building, and a shared experience of energy and excitement for the potential of digital health. By the end of the week, we learned what really happens when you bring together 115 innovators, developers, implementers, and donors for five days of un-conferencing—and it’s nothing short of magic.
If you’re interested in learning more about the global goods who attended the summit, check out our Global Goods Guidebook which includes details on each of the tools and how to use them. For information on how to become a Digital Square global good and to apply through our current Notice G1, visit the Digital Square Open Application Platform.