Opportunities and Challenges for an Organizational Digital Public Health Strategy in a Provincial Public Health Program in Canada: Qualitative Description of Practitioner Perspectives.

BACKGROUND

The digital transformation of health services accelerated during the pandemic. While "digital health" strategies were created, they paid minimal attention to public health services like health promotion, disease surveillance, emergency preparedness, and health protection.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to inform a digital public health (DPH) strategy at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) and explored public health practitioners' perspectives on challenges and opportunities of integrating digital technologies into public health functions within the organization.

METHODS

In this qualitative description, we conducted 18 focus groups (FGs) between January and June 2023, drawing practitioners from 9 organizational subunits of the BCCDC including population and public health, environmental health, clinical services, vaccine-preventable diseases, communications, knowledge translation, data analytics, and Indigenous health (2 FGs per subunit). Discussions explored practitioners' application of digital technologies in their public health work, focusing on challenges encountered during implementation (current state FGs) and perceived opportunities (future state FGs). Sessions were audio-recorded, and detailed field notes were taken. Thematic analysis was conducted, comparing perspectives across groups using constant comparative techniques.

RESULTS

We identified 3 themes. First, "bridging existing inequities-an opportunity and a challenge contingent on public trust" described participants' excitement about opportunities for DPH to disrupt historical inequities if centered on trust and reconciliation, while recognizing current digital transformation efforts risk exacerbating existing inequities with the digital divide. Second, "a sense of disconnect between "digital" and "public health" functions" described perceptions of DPH as being out of scope of core public health duties, requiring new competencies and navigation of complex organizational policies for which support is suboptimal. Third, "balancing the need for responsive DPH with necessary reactivity" highlighted practitioners' yearnings for a proactive DPH strategy rather than current issue-based reactive approaches. Participants suggest that a centralized systematic program can help achieve this goal.

CONCLUSIONS

A cohesive, systematic, and proactive organizational strategy for DPH is critical to enable equity-focused digital transformation. Such a strategy can bridge perceived disconnects between digital and public health functions through organizational supports like competency development and streamlined policies that can better support public health practitioners to integrate digital technologies into their work.