This work will deliver a review of cost estimates for the regional / global (supranational) activities needed to improve health security preparedness and protect the world from health emergencies like epidemics and pandemics. Working in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) and academic partners at Duke University, this project will deliver evidence to inform new WHO guidance and policy recommendations, Government of Twenty (G20) negotiations, and related policy negotiations prior to the 75th World Health Assembly and beyond. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for such work, with experiences over the past two years showing the importance of health security preparedness across country, regional and supranational levels. This work will complement ongoing WHO efforts to detail cost estimates for country-level resource needs for such preparedness activities. In doing so, this research will address five key issues related to determining cost estimates for pandemic preparedness and response reform: 1) Locating current and future budget / costing requirements at supranational and regional levels; 2) Detailing 'supranational' from 'regional' and 'national' activities; 3) Address the key knowledge gap around efficiency and effectiveness at the interface between national, regional and supranational levels; 4) Locate activities contributing to 'global common goods for health', and; 5) model subsystem investment prioritization strategies that can best realize these common goods for health in pandemic preparedness and response.

This proposal from the WHO-ITU is a request for financial support and links to existing European research networks on mHealth from the EC. This will enable both the: 1. Development of national mHealth interventions in selected EU member states to champion the uptake of mHealth 2. Foundation and maintenance of a centralised ‘Knowledge and Innovations Hub for mHealth’ to monitor and enable mHealth adoption and innovation. With the support of the WHO-ITU, the selected national implementations will create precedence for mHealth at scale in Europe, pave the way for other member states to follow suit and serve as a transfer of knowledge and experience from the global WHO-ITU Be Healthy Be Mobile initiative to the mHealth Hub in Europe. In future, the mHealth Hub will serve as a standalone resource for EU member states to support them in deploying and regulating mHealth in their national health services. The Hub will work as a unifying convening platform for existing national country programs on mHealth. It will bring together researchers, projects, knowledge and lessons learnt from individual mHealth projects and clinical trials. From these it will create a “big picture” which will both allow the identification of best practices and standardized guidelines, and also enable researchers to identify gaps in current research which can then help shape new studies. The support requested from the EC in the following proposal will help the initiative and WHO to assist countries to fulfil their commitment of achieving Universal Health Coverage, avoiding vertical intervention models and moving towards integrated health care systems. This will be critical in the coming years for the reduction of national health expenditures without a loss in quality or quantity of national health services.