Digital public health—leverage for community capacity building in health promotion: Current situation, developmental issues and TEAviisari as a model implementation

Abstract

In 1986, the Ottawa charter marked a paradigm shift for public health, putting the focus on strengthening community action and on creating supportive environments for health. A key to this is “capacity building” (CB), which we understand as the development and sustainable implementation of structural capacities, e.g. coordinated data collection, collaboration processes across sectors and reliable provision of basic resources in all areas of local health promotion. Many efforts and three and a half decades later we still envisage infrastructure deficits, scattered public health landscapes and restraints to intersectoral cooperation much too often. While agreement on the theoretical insights on what is needed appears to be broad, translating these insights into practice remains a challenge. In this situation, digital public health (DPH) can contribute to overcoming barriers and making knowledge for action more visible and more accessible. With DPH, data can be integrated, structured and disseminated in novel ways. We discuss why CB at the local level could benefit from technological advances and what DPH might do for the provision of information services on public health capacity. Our focus is on the web-based, interactive representation of public health data for use in information, governance or benchmarking processes. As an example from public health practice, the Finnish tool TEAviisari (National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland) is presented. The 2020 EU Council Presidency of Germany – with the topics of digitalisation and the common European health data space – offers opportunities to decisively advance the development of CB in health promotion in this country.