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Digital healthcare has rapidly evolved during and in the post-COVID pandemic era, expanding the roles and responsibilities of community pharmacists. Services like telepharmacy, e-prescriptions, remote medication therapy management, and digital monitoring of chronic conditions, have evolved into everyday routine pharmacy practices. Pharmacists are at the forefront and the most accessible healthcare professionals for patients and are increasingly pivotal in providing comprehensive patient care, including digital patient care services. To ensure that future generations of pharmacists are digitally competent, it is crucial that digital health education is provided to pharmacy students. Furthermore, fostering high-quality multidisciplinary research, particularly in collaboration with medicine and other health disciplines, is essential for advancing the digital health skills of the future pharmacy workforce. Despite the growing use of digital health technologies, there are significant between-country differences in digital health education, the clinical settings in which digital health technologies are used, and their implementation in day-to-day practice. This commentary summarizes key insights from the International Digital Health Workshop held at the University of Sydney in November 2023. To help ensure pharmacists are included as participants in future digital health research, recent advances in digital health education and interprofessional research projects across three universities from far-off world regions were presented. Participants discussed a possible collaborative, interprofessional, and international research project on chronic disease prevention using digital health technologies. The need for interdisciplinary digital health curricula was highlighted in the workshop discussions, specifically tailored to address the knowledge requirements of pharmacists and other healthcare professionals.

The fossiliferous deposits within the lower-lying Jacovec Cavern in the locality of Sterkfontein yielded valuable hominin remains, including the StW 578 specimen. Because StW 578 mainly preserves the calotte, the taxonomic status of this specimen has been a matter of discussion. Within this context, here we employed high-resolution microtomography and a landmark-free registration method to explore taxonomically diagnostic features in the external surface of the StW 578 calotte. Our comparative sample included adult humans and common chimpanzees as well as one Australopithecus africanus specimen (Sts 5). We partially restored the StW 578 calotte digitally and compared it to extant specimens and Sts 5 using a landmark-free registration based on smooth and invertible surface deformation. Our comparative shape analysis reveals morphological differences with extant humans, especially in the frontal bones, and with extant chimpanzees, as well as intriguing specificities in the morphology of the StW 578 parietal bones. Lastly, our study suggests morphological proximity between StW 578 and Sts 5. Given the intimate relationship between the brain and the braincase, as well as the integration of the hominin face and neurocranium, we suggest that cranial vault shape differences between StW 578 and extant humans, if confirmed by further analyses, could be either explained by differences in brain surface morphology or in the face. Besides providing additional information about the morphology of the Jacovec calotte that will be useful in future taxonomic discussion, this study introduces a new protocol for the landmark-free analysis of fossil hominin cranial shape. Significance: • We provide further information on the enigmatic fossil specimen StW 578. • We introduce a new approach for the morphological study of fossil hominin crania. • We highlight morphological similarities between StW 578 and ‘Mrs Ples’.