One Digital Health: A Unified Framework for Future Health Ecosystems

Background: One Digital Health is a proposed unified structure. The conceptual framework of the One Digital Health Steering Wheel is built around two keys (ie, One Health and digital health), three perspectives (ie, individual health and well-being, population and society, and ecosystem), and five dimensions (ie, citizens’ engagement, education, environment, human and veterinary health care, and Healthcare Industry 4.0).

Objective: One Digital Health aims to digitally transform future health ecosystems, by implementing a systemic health and life sciences approach that takes into account broad digital technology perspectives on human health, animal health, and the management of the surrounding environment.

Methods: This approach allows for the examination of how future generations of health informaticians can address the intrinsic complexity of novel health and care scenarios in digitally transformed health ecosystems. In the emerging hybrid landscape, citizens and their health data have been called to play a central role in the management of individual-level and population-level perspective data.

Methods: The main challenges of One Digital Health and of its model include facilitating and improving interactions between One Health and digital health communities, to allow for efficient interactions and the delivery of near–real-time, data-driven contributions in systems medicine and systems ecology. However, digital health literacy; the capacity to understand and engage in health prevention activities; self-management; and collaboration in the prevention, control, and alleviation of potential problems are necessary in systemic, ecosystem-driven public health and data science research.

Conclusions: People in a healthy One Digital Health ecosystem must use an active and forceful approach to prevent and manage health crises and disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Benis A, Tamburis O, Chronaki C, Moen A, One Digital Health: A Unified Framework for Future Health Ecosystems, J Med Internet Res 2021;23(2):e22189, doi: 10.2196/22189, PMID: 33492240, PMCID: 7886486