REPLAY: It’s March 11th. Let’s try to fight Covid differently. How would you do it?

Suppose you have the ability to go back to March 11th of 2020 -  the date the WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic1. What could have been done differently with respect to digital health product development? Were domain experts utilized to the best of their abilities? What can we learn from COVID-19 for future public health crises planning? Digital health data is now, more than ever, deeply influencing our lives. Having robust digital health tools to support public health surveillance is no longer a problem for technocrats. It’s everyone’s business now. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the opportunity to lead a digital health startup, Flatten.ca, that focused on collecting symptom data from people in Canada and in Somalia2. This experience led to collaborations with big-tech companies, researchers, government officials, startups, and investors. Reflecting back on my experiences, I see many flaws in the process by which the North-American community decided to develop and deploy digital health tools. Simply put, a lack of speed and strategically allocated domain expertise hindered our success. Why did Canada take 5 months to launch a contact tracing app and Singapore only 10 days? This perspective piece aims at answering the questions highlighted above and analyzing the North-American response to build digital health tools as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. Whether you’re an investor, academic, student, founder, or otherwise involved in the digital health industry, and you’re thinking about how to effectively support product development for future public health crises, this can help better inform where your efforts are best spent.