In 2016 the Commonwealth Medical Association held its first Digital Health Conference and Digital Health Awards alongside the 24th Triennial Conference of the Association in October 2016. By doing so we aimed to bring digital health and its enormous potential to the attention of the policy makers at the highest level in all Commonwealth countries. We succeed in that process. The Commonwealth Secretariat’s Policy Brief on Digital Health stands testimony to that.
In addition we aimed to empower and recognize individuals and organisations spearheading digital health innovation and implementation in Commonwealth countries. This we achieved through the Commonwealth Digital Health Awards. The details of the conference and awards can be found on last year’s conference website http://www.cma2016.org.
We were encouraged by the success of the conference last year. The energy and the enthusiasm of the participants was enormous. We saw that there were many innovative idea that were waiting transformation to digital health solutions. This made us select the theme for this year’s conference ‘Transforming innovative ideas into digital health solutions’. The Commonwealth Digital Health Awards will recognize the best innovations. The Commonwealth Medical Association is committed to supporting them mature and scale up across the Commonwealth through the Commonwealth Institute for Digital Health.
In this background it gives me great pleasure to invite all of you to the Digital Health Sri Lanka 2017, 2nd Commonwealth Digital Health Conference and the 2nd Commonwealth Digital Health Awards.
I look forward to welcoming all of you in Colombo in October.
Prof. Vajira H. W. Dissanayake MBBS, PhD, FNASSL