Historically, the field of digital health has been overrun by fragmented funding and pilots that achieve neither scale nor sustainability. As a result, strong governance and new models of data collaboration are crucial to ensuring desired health impacts are achieved and Sustainable Development Goal targets are met. 

Today, these data collaborations involve increasingly diverse sets of partners -- across sectors, verticals, organizations, and levels of the health system. There are multiple benefits to such collaboration -- including more efficient resource allocation, better risk mitigation, broader and more complete data sets, economies of scale, and geographic scope of impact. However, without the establishment of good governance practices from the start, nascent attempts at data collaboration will be slow, unwieldy, and unsustainable. 

The objective of this interactive session is to foster a dialogue around the governance of new health data collaborative models that link top-down, funder-driven efforts to improve efficiency in digital investments with ground-up, non-profit-driven collaborations to accelerate health impact in the field. The conversation will link broad concepts of strong collaborative governance with real-world examples of agenda alignment, conflict resolution, and risk pooling. Panelists will represent the perspectives of funders, researchers, implementers, and technologists.

Through this session we hope to advance a community of practice that integrates data across sectors for efficiency, addresses donor priorities to achieve scale, and leads to the establishment of best practices for services delivered using digital tools and technology. 

Cloudera Foundation is a Silicon Valley-based private philanthropy established by Cloudera, Inc., the enterprise data cloud company. The foundation works to enable nonprofits worldwide to use advanced data analytics and machine learning to improve people's lives and protect the planet. We collaborate with grantees to build their data engineering capacity through direct access to technology, data expertise and long-term technical support. Our multi-year partnerships allow nonprofits to establish infrastructure and develop technical capabilities to scale and sustain their high-impact work.