Pakistan Digital Authority hosted a delegation from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at its headquarters for a meeting chaired by PDA Chairperson Dr. Sohail Munir, alongside senior representatives of both organizations including Elisabeth Hesse, Country Director of the US CDC Pakistan Office, and Dr. Muhammad Afzal, Global Health Security Advisor. The meeting was convened to explore how the two sides can work together to advance Pakistan’s digital health ecosystem, with a particular focus on the foundational infrastructure that enables disease surveillance to function effectively: the secure, interoperable movement of health information between institutions that hold it.
The two sides identified several areas for potential collaboration. These include health data interoperability and secure exchange between public health institutions, the development of national digital health standards and data governance frameworks, health information systems and agreed minimum health data sets, infectious disease surveillance and early detection, artificial intelligence-enabled analytics for disease detection and response, integration of human and animal health data where relevant, and technical collaboration and capacity building across both organizations. PDA briefed the US CDC delegation on the National Digital Masterplan, the Digital Health Sector Plan, and the proposed national health data exchange framework, explaining how PDA sets the standards, interoperability frameworks, and governance structures that allow health information to move securely across federal and provincial systems without being siloed within individual institutions or administrative tiers.
The meeting also covered PDA’s ongoing work with the National Institute of Health, including the development of the National Health Data Centre and the use of artificial intelligence-based analytics to improve disease surveillance capabilities. The National Health Data Centre is intended to serve as a central repository through which health data from across the country’s fragmented health information systems can be aggregated, standardized, and analyzed in ways that individual institutional systems cannot support on their own. The integration of artificial intelligence into this analytical layer is expected to significantly shorten the time between the emergence of an outbreak signal and the point at which public health authorities are able to identify it and respond, a capability that has been consistently identified as a critical gap in Pakistan’s health security infrastructure.
Both sides agreed to maintain regular coordination and to explore specific opportunities where US CDC technical expertise can support PDA’s work on digital health governance and surveillance infrastructure. The engagement reflects a growing recognition that building a health ecosystem where information moves securely and in real time between institutions, from primary health centers to provincial health departments to federal agencies, is not something any single organization can accomplish in isolation. What turns scattered health records into early warning capability is the ability of connected systems to function as a unified whole, and the meeting between PDA and the US CDC signals that Pakistan is actively seeking the technical partnerships and governance frameworks needed to build that capability at national scale.
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