The WHO Hub has transitioned from leading the conceptual development of collaborative surveillance to promoting its global implementation.

Implementing collaborative surveillance plans at the national and regional levels is a top priority, and work is already under way in South-east Asia and Africa. In October 2023, the WHO Hub held a technical workshop to support tool development with the WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia. In November 2023, the team co-facilitated the Zambia Integrated and Collaborative Disease Surveillance Workshop and Leadership Forum to help shape a three-year project for strengthening surveillance capacities.

Similar partner-supported efforts to pilot collaborative surveillance implementation are under way in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Nigeria.

In 2023, the WHO Health Emergencies Programme set out to strengthen countries’ ability to prevent, rapidly detect, respond to and recover from any health emergency crisis. The Programme held a consultation in 2023 with NPHA representatives from WHO Member States and experts from regional health agencies and partner organizations to identify priority areas to take forward.

The WHO Hub is supporting the Health Emergencies Programme in delivering on a number of these areas, including defining the core emergency preparedness and response functions, documenting NPHA governance models, facilitating peer-to-peer learning opportunities, and more.

The EIOS initiative provides Member States and partner organizations with a suite of integrated services for early detection, assessment and rapid response to public health threats.

EIOS expanded its user communities globally, with 34 Member States and 3 organizations joining in 2023, bringing the total number of users to 85 Member States and more than 20 organizations and networks. The team provided a total of 68 training workshops in 45 countries and organizations, and trained more than 1100 users in 2023, strengthening early detection of public health threats.

Genomic sequencing is a proven method of detecting new pathogens quickly, but many regions lack the tools necessary for effective genomic surveillance. The IPSN addresses these disparities by connecting countries, regions and disease-specific networks to solve common challenges in pathogen genomics collaboratively.

TIn 2023, we produced a blueprint, a partner outreach strategy and an investment case for the simulator. In 2024, the WHO Hub will identify funding and technology partners and start developing the first version of the simulator.

Launched in June 2023, the OSPO tackles digital health fragmentation through collaboration, with a mission to provide decision-makers, health professionals and civil society actors with high-quality, co-developed and openly accessible essential tools and knowledge for informed public health decisions.

In 2023, the OSPO began hosting webinars on open source concepts and platforms to encourage collaboration among global experts in software, data science and AI. It also started hosting exchange events with open source contributor communities, with a focus on developing open source models for more effective and sustainable inter-institutional collaboration and open innovation.

The WHO Hub’s OSPO will continue to serve as a leader for other organizations by sharing the benefits of the open source model of collaboration.

Through workshops and hackathons, the Collaboratory convened data modellers, public health officials, academics and others to address global challenges.

The Collaboratory achieved important milestones in 2023 by establishing a Technical Advisory Group, formalizing a key partnership with the data.org platform, and convening its communities of practice.

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The establishment of an evidence-base for collaborative surveillance has been ad hoc. The ecosystem for the development of methods, tools, and implementation approaches currently has limited strategic coherence, and insufficient attention has been given to translational efforts to implement research outputs and to conducting robust evaluations of impact. Without an evidence-base, there is potential for negative impacts on public health surveillance due to further fragmentation, technological debt, and large opportunity costs.

The WHO Hub is leading a global consultation process to define the global research priorities for collaborative surveillance, in close cooperation with a technical working group including Wellcome, the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R), the Charité University Hospital, and the WHO Science Division. A policy brief on the outcome of the research prioritization exercise will be published in June 2024.

In 2023, the WHO Hub created a comprehensive PHI landscape analysis report, developed a draft competency framework and curriculum, and established a dedicated working group to guide future training efforts.

We also defined PHI learning profiles to facilitate customized training programmes. Partnerships with key stakeholders such as TEPHINET, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and RKI furthered our goal of building strong PHI workforces.

Our dedication to strengthening PHI capacity extends beyond global levels. In 2023, we engaged closely with various partners in the field, fostering collaboration to fortify PHI capacity at the global, national and subnational levels. Through these multifaceted efforts, we are not only shaping the present landscape but also laying a robust foundation for an agile and adaptive response to future health challenges.

Together with partners, the WHO Hub works on improving the relevance, for individual communities, of the screening of online information via PHI tools such as the EIOS; developing modules to detect and summarize currently relevant topics; improving the semantic search of online sources; and more.

Beside these innovative software-development activities, we also work on strategic and guidance documents for responsible research in the use of AI for PHI, including the development of large AI models for public health.