Peer-to-Peer AI Network Meeting at the LSC Digital Public Health Bremen

Professor Dr. Hajo Zeeb, Head of the Department of Prevention and Evaluation at Leibniz-BIPS and spokesperson for the Leibniz ScienceCampus Digital Public Health Bremen (LSC DiPH), Professor Dr.-Ing. Horst K. Hahn, spokesperson for the UBRA lead project Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Director of Fraunhofer MEVIS, and Dr. Monika Michaelis, coordinator of the UBRA lead project Artificial Intelligence (AI), welcomed the participants. To open the meeting, Professor Zeeb gave an overview of the first funding phase of the LSC DiPH. The LSC DiPH unites a large network in Bremen, which was expanded to Oldenburg in the second phase, focusing on health sciences. Public Health aims to promote and improve the health of individuals and communities through collective social efforts. Recently, a variety of digital technologies have emerged that pursue the same goal. At LSC DiPH, researchers investigate how digitalization can support public health. Key questions include how different population groups can access and use these technologies (health literacy) and how the digital divide can be addressed.

Given the rapid growth in digital health technologies, a systematic framework is needed to assess their impact from a public health perspective. One such framework was developed during the first funding phase. It supports developers, evaluators, decision-makers, and researchers in the systematic development and evaluation of digital public health interventions. A public health intervention is any initiative or policy aimed at improving mental and physical health at the population level. The LSC DiPH Framework offers a comprehensive overview of criteria for evaluating digital public health interventions. These criteria are framed as open-ended questions and organized into topic areas that guide interested stakeholders through a wide range of key aspects involved in developing and evaluating digital public health interventions.

Building on the first phase, which focused on exploring the concepts and application areas of Digital Public Health (DiPH), the second funding phase focuses on putting those insights into practice and testing them in real-world settings. The goal is to address concrete public health challenges and contribute sustainably to the population's health. As a current use case from the second phase, Professor Zeeb presented a study on digital tools for tobacco prevention.

Dr. Laura Maaß demonstrated that Digital Public Health must also take the health system as a whole into account. She completed her doctoral studies during the first funding phase of LSC DiPH and now works as a postdoc on the campus. In her dissertation, she developed a tool that evaluates how prepared a health system is for digitalization, including all areas of public health in the maturity assessment, such as technological infrastructure, legal frameworks, and social factors.