Gender
Challenges
Awareness of gender issues is low in CAREC countries. The COVID-19 pandemic also exacerbated pre-existing challenges, including access to health services, earnings and job opportunities disparities, mental health issues, and gender-based violence.
Focus
Drawing greater attention to the health needs of women and considering women in designing services and analyzing data.
Proposed Actions
- Improve sex disaggregation of data in the health sector
- Ensure health projects incorporate gender concepts, gaps, and implementation options
- Include specific needs of women in health planning and designing of services
Innovation
Challenges
Being able to rapidly adopt innovations is key to vibrant, adaptive health systems, and to preparing for future pandemics.
Focus
Improving the technical capacity for adopting and scaling up innovative models and solutions.
Proposed Actions
- Create awareness-raising about existing innovative solutions for mitigating health crises
- Conduct capacity-building workshops and webinars on innovative solutions in the health sector
- Develop health emergencies innovation fund
- Create regional innovations knowledge exchange platform
Digital Health
Challenges
CAREC countries are at differing stages of digital readiness and maturity. The ability to collect and analyze health service usage data is vital for health security and pandemic preparedness. While promoting confidentiality of patient data, CAREC countries should seek opportunities to build shareable resources for digital health.
Focus
Strengthening health information systems in the CAREC region and managing data jointly and more efficiently.
Proposed Actions
- Assess gaps and identify country digital health priorities
- Propose health data exchange architectures
- Enhance application interfaces, and standards that enable secure interoperability
- Enhance practical experimental initiatives for regionally unified health data coding
- Enhance regional policy dialogues, knowledge exchange and capacity building
- Improve data management and data capture mechanisms