Dear Hannah,
Thank you for representing HIFA at this year's World Health Assembly. It is wonderful to have HIFA members at the front line of health policy.
You said: "A quote from today’s session I resonated with was “Innovation without access is injustice”..."
This makes a good starter for discussion here on HIFA...
I agree that innovation without access is injustice. I would add that well-established and affordable interventions that are locally available but not provided is an even greater injustice.
Failure to provide locally available interventions includes the most basic decisions such as whether to give a child with diarrhoea more fluids (thereby leading to recovery) or less fluids (thereby increasing risk of death). A personal experience – the avoidable death of a child in Peru in 1987 because of the false belief that one should withhold fluids with a child with diarrheoa — was my seminal moment in campaigning for equity in health information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax4iS4-AuO0&t=19s
There are hundreds of other examples where a lack of basic reliable healthcare information leads to failures to provide timely interventions that are otherwise locally available, ranging from misdiagnosis and incorrect treatments through to deaths from advanced cancer due to delays in seeking care.
You also noted: "Chief Scientist of the WHO, Dr. Sylvie Briand, led discourse on medical disinformation and how to effectively combat it as reliance on AI applications for medical queries rise... Some suggestions included initiatives for strengthening social listening capability... impediments to knowledge share caused by journals paywalling their research papers... healthcare workers are now embracing misinformation from probabilistic tools trained on web scraping rather than vetted medical research papers and guidelines."
Indeed there is a huge amount of misinformation and disinformation. AI can be used as a tool to deliberately spread disinformation. Using AI to answer personal medical questions is another issue. Personally I am optimistic that AI will on balance improve the availability of reliable healthcare information rather than reduce it, and I look forward to hear what you and others think.
Strengthening social listening capability is important to understand how misinformation originates and spreads, and this can be used to help combat misinformation. My take on this is that the best way to combat misinformation is to accelerate progress towards universal access to reliable healthcare information, and that this requires us to better understand and strengthen the global evidence ecosystem. This is the purpose of HIFA and the recommendation of our global consultation in 2023, which was follwed by the launch of the WHO Global Coalition for Evidence in 2024. Unfortunately both HIFA and the Coalitionare severely limited in what we can do,
Thanks again Hanna and we look forward to further updates from Geneva.
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org