Abstract
The field of digital public health has matured considerably over the past decade. Early definitions centred on the use of digital technologies to deliver public health functions. Over time, research has clarified important distinctions between digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation, showing that each represents a qualitatively different level of change with different implications for public health systems and populations. This conceptual development has moved the field from asking how public health can use digital tools toward asking what digital transformation means for the conditions that shape population health. That shift has opened a broader and more complex agenda. Digital transformation produces new determinants of health in their own right. Platform and algorithm design determine who is seen, served, or excluded by health systems. Digital health literacy has emerged as a super-determinant mediating existing social inequities across age, income, education, and geography. Commercially driven information environments reshape health beliefs and risk perceptions at population scale. Data governance structures determine who benefits from digital transformation and who carries its risks. Emergency preparedness now depends as much on digital surveillance infrastructure, responsible AI, and trusted public communication as on clinical capacity. The practical stakes are immediate and recognizable to anyone working in public health systems. Research in Canadian provincial health systems has examined what it takes to develop organisational digital public health strategies, surfacing structural gaps in workforce competency and governance that practitioners recognise immediately. Work on measuring digital public health system maturity in Europe has shown that readiness spans far beyond technology infrastructure, requiring legal frameworks, population-level digital literacy, and institutional capacity. The recent designation of the world’s first WHO Collaborating Centre dedicated to digital public health and pandemic preparedness marks a significant institutional recognition that emergency preparedness must now be understood through this lens. This round table brings together researchers and practitioners from Canada, Europe, and global institutional frameworks to explore how the field of digital public health has evolved, what its core concepts mean for practice, and how digital transformation is reshaping population health in ways that current systems are not yet equipped to handle. The session will utilise a Structured Deliberative Dialogue design, where lightning talks are followed by live-polled tensions that the audience and panel must collaboratively resolve through a moderated solution-mapping exercise. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how these shifts apply to their own work, and a sharper picture of where their institutions and systems need to build capacity to respond.
Key messages
• Digital transformation generates new determinants of health requiring active governance, moving digital public health well beyond technology deployment.
• Building institutional capacity to respond spans workforce development, governance frameworks, system maturity, and emergency preparedness across jurisdictions.
Speakers/Panellists
Laura Maaß
Leibniz ScienceCampus Digital Public Health, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Grace Turner
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK
Neville Calleja
Department of Health Information and Research, G’Mangia, Malta
Elena Petelos
Faculty of Medicine, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece