Speaker on Datafication and healthcare at the Royal Tropical Institute

Looks like May is blowing up on me. Getting intense but fascinating to be moving among very diverse circles from tech activists in Berlin to mobile healthcare ministries and healthcare donors. My book The Next Billion Users is definitely pushing me into many different worlds all grappling with similar questions on fairness, tradeoffs, privacy futures, user aspirations, cultural differentiation and data regulation to name a few.

So on May 9th I spoke at the Future of Health Coverage conference in Amsterdam. This is an event organized in partnership with the Financial Times, Joep Lange Institute, and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These organizations have been some of the ones who started to focus on the importance of financial innovation and the role of mobile technology in improving health systems in developing countries well before it became mainstream through mhealth initiatives and mobile apps.

Some questions explored together were How can we allow those in need to ‘pay’ with their data? How can we find a balance between privacy first, in the interest of the individual, and mandatory sharing of (health) data, in the interest of society?

I spoke on a panel on the Value of Data  for Health. Here is a brief synopsis of the panel:

Big Data has changed the way we manage, analyse and leverage data in any industry. For the first time in history, we have the opportunity in developing countries - due to digital technology - to collect and analyse large amounts of health data. How can we assure the value created with health data flows back to society, to strengthen the health system for the good of all?

And what is cool is that Her Majesty Queen Máxima of the Netherlands will be one of the Speakers too! Turns out she is also the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate
for Inclusive Finance for Development.