Fostering inclusive co-creation in digital health

The rapid advancement of digital health, especially with AI, offers transformative potential for healthcare. But ensuring these innovations truly benefit patients and systems isn't just a technical challenge – it's an ethical and societal one. This is the core message of a new article, "Fostering inclusive co-creation in digital health," published in npj Digital Medicine, co-authored by Prof. Effy Vayena, Alessandro Blasimme and Constantin Landers.

The Need for Inclusive Co-Creation
While early responsible digital health research focused on technical aspects like reliability and data protection, there's a growing recognition that stakeholder involvement is crucial. Digital health innovations must align with the real-world needs of those who use them, particularly healthcare practitioners (HCPs) and patients. "Co-creation" means involving a wide range of relevant actors in problem-solving during technological development. This ensures diverse perspectives, values, and interests inform the design of digital health tools.

The Vital Role of Healthcare Practitioners
The article further highlights the often-underestimated role of Healthcare Practioners. They are essential not just as users, but as active participants in: testing and monitoring, validating solutions in clinical settings, adapting tools for specific patient needs, and for shaping best practices.

The authors suggest that agile regulation, through mechanisms like regulatory sandboxes, can provide a framework for engaging HCPs and other stakeholders, allowing them to influence how technologies are created, tested, and validated for clinical use.