Digital health is now firmly on the agenda. Yet scaling up solutions and sharing what actually works remain stubbornly difficult. "This is precisely where GDHD plays an essential role", says Caroline Perrin, Executive Director of the gdhub. "There is an urgent need to learn without reinventing the wheel — to build on existing projects, share what works, and avoid repeating the same mistakes." Co-founded in 2021 by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the University of Geneva, the gdhub consolidates knowledge from pioneering projects such as RAFT — the Réseau en Afrique Francophone pour la Télémédecine, created in 2003 by the HUG and UNIGE Faculty of Medicine — and brings together digital health expertise to accelerate the transformation of health systems worldwide.

GDHD also aims to bring together, in a single day, a deliberately diverse range of participants — frontline practitioners alongside senior government and policy figures — in order to confront concrete experience with strategic intent.

From crisis to resilience: ensuring sustainability

Alain Labrique, Director of the WHO's Department of Data, Digital Health, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (DDA), offered an initial diagnosis: policymakers have finally grasped the issues that the digital health community has been raising for years — questions of architecture, interoperability, semantic standards, and governance. The downside of this shift: the rapid arrival of artificial intelligence risks replaying the same old pattern: fragmented tools, isolated pilots, poor interoperability, and an inability to scale.

The example of Lebanon's Ministry of Health mental health programme illustrated another dimension: built in and despite successive crises, it demonstrates that an emergency can become a catalyst — provided that governance, funding, and real-world workflows receive the same careful attention as the technology itself. Aarti Holla-Maini, Director General of UNOOSA (United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs), put it plainly: "In a world of overlapping crises, resilience is no longer about reacting faster, but about being continuously prepared. That means moving from isolated interventions to systemic approaches that integrate early detection, data, governance, and decision-making into routine operations. Technology must be a structural component, not an emergency response."

Can responsible AI be a reality?

Nowadays, no event of this kind can sidestep artificial intelligence. Catherine Pollard, Director of Impact at Google DeepMind, opted for nuance over enthusiasm in her keynote: "We are neither in the euphoria nor yet in reality. We are at the beginning of a long road. For populations struggling to access healthcare, AI represents a genuine opportunity — one that still needs to be realised."

The CEO of Health AI, representatives from the Ministries of Health of the Philippines and Zambia, and a representative from the OECD confronted the technological promise and the reality of implementation in resource-constrained health systems. The experiences of the Philippines and Zambia illustrated concretely what it means to move from a fragmented, disease-by-disease pilot logic to a systemic and scalable approach — particularly in terms of political leadership, standards, and institutional trust. And trust cannot be mandated, but must be built through robust governance mechanisms and regulatory pathways that offer equitable guarantees.

Fail Festival: when failure becomes a collective resource

Can we learn from failure? "Absolutely", says Caroline Perrin. "And our Fail Festival — one of GDHD's most anticipated sessions — is there to prove it." From Zanzibar to Afghanistan, from Uttar Pradesh to Uganda, the accounts converged on a single finding: digital health projects rarely fail because of the code. They fail when workflows, incentives, governance, funding, and local ownership have not received the same attention as the technology. "We need to create the conditions for honest reflection on failure, so that lessons circulate before the same mistakes repeat themselves across the entire digital health ecosystem", adds Caroline Perrin.

The value of an event like this also lies in its ability to build bridges — between specialists, regions, projects, and funders. A deliberately practical space, very much in the spirit of GDHD.