Avoidable mortality, risk factors and policies for tackling noncommunicable diseases – leveraging data for impact: monitoring commitments in the WHO European Region ahead of the Fourth United Nations High-Level Meeting

US Domestic Policy Dashboard - Impact Counter | Impact Counter

Explore US domestic policies and their impact on public health across all branches of government.

Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health

Far-reaching changes to the structure and function of the Earth's natural systems represent a growing threat to human health. And yet, global health has mainly improved as these changes have gathered pace. What is the explanation? As a Commission, we are deeply concerned that the explanation is straightforward and sobering: we have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present. By unsustainably exploiting nature's resources, human civilisation has flourished but now risks substantial health effects from the degradation of nature's life support systems in the future.

Implementation of Digital Monitoring Services During the COVID-19 Pandemic for Patients With Chronic Diseases: Design Science Approach

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is straining health systems and disrupting the delivery of health care services, in particular, for older adults and people with chronic conditions, who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 infection. Objective: The aim of this project was to support primary health care provision with a digital health platform that will allow primary care physicians and nurses to remotely manage the care of patients with chronic diseases or COVID-19 infections. Methods: For the rapid design and implementation of a digital platform to support primary health care services, we followed the Design Science implementation framework: (1) problem identification and motivation, (2) definition of the objectives aligned with goal-oriented care, (3) artefact design and development based on Scrum, (4) solution demonstration, (5) evaluation, and (6) communication. Results: The digital platform was developed for the specific objectives of the project and successfully piloted in 3 primary health care centers in the Lisbon Health Region. Health professionals (n=53) were able to remotely manage their first patients safely and thoroughly, with high degrees of satisfaction. Conclusions: Although still in the first steps of implementation, its positive uptake, by both health care providers and patients, is a promising result. There were several limitations including the low number of participating health care units. Further research is planned to deploy the platform to many more primary health care centers and evaluate the impact on patient’s health related outcomes.

STAT

Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine

Metrics for biodiversity and health policy integration

Despite over a decade of progressive commitments from parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), integrated biodiversity and health indicators and monitoring mechanisms remain limited, hampering achievement of the sustainable development goals and improvements in health and well-being. Adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (2022) and the Global Action Plan on Biodiversity and Health (2024) provide a renewed entry point to shape the way governments approach health and wellbeing and address the environmental burden of disease. This is a critical opportunity that scholars at the health-environment nexus should not miss. This Perspective outlines building blocks to mobilize the field, starting with essential terminology and a scope of metrics needed by governments. We then evaluate elements to be considered in the construction of integrated metrics, including concepts, overarching challenges, a review of scientific hypotheses from an ecological perspective, as well as a set of principles and characteristics for indicators. To raise awareness across parallel communities of practice working at the health-environment nexus, we then briefly examine four approaches to integrated metrics developed by: conservationists, Indigenous scholars, One Health experts, and planetary health experts. We conclude with actionable steps to enhance governance, mobilize funding, and apply integrated indicators in national and global strategies. A broad science community is needed to support national governments to meet global commitments to address biodiversity loss and the environmental burden of disease concurrently. The overall aim of this paper is to contribute to addressing biodiversity loss by effectively linking policy and transdisciplinary practice at the health-environment nexus.

U.S. Demands to Access Africans’ Data Raise Privacy, Sovereignty Concerns — ProPublica

The United States is requiring access to health data as part of lifesaving aid deals with African countries. The U.S. says the data will be aggregated and anonymized, but privacy experts fear the information could be misused or exploited.

Health-Informed Computing: Estimating and Addressing the Public Health Impact of Data Centers

The surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a rapid expansion of energy-intensive data centers, contributing to criteria air pollutant emissions and raising public health concerns that have received comparatively limited attention in sustainability assessments. This paper introduces a principled methodology to model air pollutant emissions for data centers and estimate the public health impacts. Our findings reveal that the growing demand for AI and computing technologies is projected to push the total annual public health burden of U.S. data centers up to more than $20 billion in 2028. Although national-level impacts remain modest, data center health costs are unevenly distributed: in the most affected counties, the estimated per-household health burden can reach about seven times the national average. Next, we propose a health-informed computing framework that explicitly incorporates public health impacts into data center resource management across space and time, mitigating public health costs while supporting environmental sustainability. More broadly, we recommend extended energy reporting to include public health impact of data centers and paying attention to all impacted communities.

Health-Informed Computing: Estimating and Addressing the Public Health Impact of Data Centers

The surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a rapid expansion of energy-intensive data centers, contributing to criteria air pollutant emissions and raising public health concerns that have received comparatively limited attention in sustainability assessments. This paper introduces a principled methodology to model air pollutant emissions for data centers and estimate the public health impacts. Our findings reveal that the growing demand for AI and computing technologies is projected to push the total annual public health burden of U.S. data centers up to more than $20 billion in 2028. Although national-level impacts remain modest, data center health costs are unevenly distributed: in the most affected counties, the estimated per-household health burden can reach about seven times the national average. Next, we propose a health-informed computing framework that explicitly incorporates public health impacts into data center resource management across space and time, mitigating public health costs while supporting environmental sustainability. More broadly, we recommend extended energy reporting to include public health impact of data centers and paying attention to all impacted communities.

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Civic Health Project

Technology can connect or divide us. At Civic Health Project, we're dedicated to advancing massively scalable solutions to society's dangerous divisions.

Sustainable Development Goals

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015. It is built around 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets that represent an ambitious plan for achieving sustainable development and serves as the basis for countries to shape their national policies and priorities. At the heart of the agenda is the recognition that truely sustainable development must combine economic growth and poverty alleviation with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, while addressing climate change and protecting nature. Thus, the interlinked nature of the SDGs calls for an integrated approach to policy decisions. As the international statistical standard for measuring the environment and its relationship with the economy, the SEEA is well positioned to support integrated policies based on a better understanding of the interactions and trade-offs between the environment and economy. Progress toward the 17 goals and 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda are monitored through 244 indicators, entailing the collection of substantial amounts of data. The UN Statistical Commission (UNSC) has encouraged the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs), the body tasked with developing and implementing the global indicator framework for the 2030 Agenda, to consider existing standards and frameworks that can improve SDG monitoring, including the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA). System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA). Recently, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), UN Environment and the UN Statistics Division brought a proposal on upgrading the status of Indicator 15.9.1 to the tenth meeting of the IAEG-SDGs, where the group agreed to the proposal and reclassified the indicator from Tier III to Tier II. The United Nations Committee of Experts on Environmental-Economic Accounting (UNCEEA), an intergovernmental body established by the UNSC to provide overall vision, coordination, prioritization and direction in the field of environmental economic accounting and supporting statistics, has assessed that currently 40 indicators for nine Sustainable Development Goals can be informed by the SEEA. The SEEA is particularly well-suited for deriving ratio indicators that compare environmental and economic information.

The Medium is the Message: How Non-Clinical Information Shapes Clinical Decisions in LLMs | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

There has been a growing interest in the HCI community to study Health, with particular focus in understanding healthcare practices and designing technologies to support and to enhance these practices. A majority of current health studies in HCI have ...

Kenya’s Health Deal Is a Stress Test for the America First Global Health Strategy

U.S. agreements must contend with national data protection laws to make durable foreign policy instruments.

Global aid cuts could lead to 23 million deaths by 2030, study estimates

Lab tests are negative for more than 200 pathogens, but testing continues.

Digitalisation in Europe – 2025 edition - Interactive publications - Eurostat

Digital technologies are transforming the world we live and work in. They touch many different aspects of our lives, from everyday tasks like making phone calls and shopping to how businesses and public services operate. Digital transformation is one of the key priorities for the EU. The digital decade initiative sets out the EU targets that will guide digital transformation until 2030.