Digital Global Health
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{{Keywords |Keywords=Digital Health, Digital health, Digital Health Platform, |Wikipedia=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_health |ItemText== Digital Health = Digital Health is typically structured in
- Digital Health Platforms for information gathering and decision making (upstream)
- Digital Health Promotion for empowering every single human
- Sensor and sensor-based diagnosis, including mobile phones with accessories
- Big data analysis for e.g. epidemiology
Global Health
Global Health addresses health on a global context, addressing health for all people worldwide. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_health
Digital Health Platforms
Healthcare industry is well-regarded, as they provide a better and longer life, and help to turn illness into well-being. Though, the healthcare ecosystem is complex, with a number of stakeholders [1] including:
- internal users such as patients, nurse, doctors, technicians
- external users such as policy maker, the general public and researchers
- healthcare facilities being primary health facilities, hospitals
- the range of healthcare-based businesses and services, ranging from laboratories, pharmacies, ambulance services, insurance companies to e.g. nursing care centres, and
- governing bodies being Ministry of health, national institutes for health, and universities
When addressing Digital Health Platforms, the first challenge is to identify the primary focus of the platform, e.g.
- collecting data for decision makers;
- running a hospital;
- ensuring emergency care taking, a.o. to coordinate activities between ambulances and hospitals;
- creating an inventory, e.g. cancer register, for research;
- promoting health information for the end users; or
- supporting a single person with the sensors and information needed.
The Seminar will provide an intro into the complexity of digital health platforms, e.g. addressing the differences between a platform and a software product. We will further present examples of excellent developments having reached the market, including the obstacles seen in global digital health provisioning. The seminar will help decision makers to see the pros and cons of solutions, ranging from single homogeneous software platform architectures to architectures supporting heterogeneous and interoperable platforms.
Examples of Digital Health Platforms
The Digital Square Global Goods Handbook does a good job of describing a variety of the digital health global good software platforms available to countries today, addressing a.o.
- Distributed Health Information Platform (DHIS2), an open-source tool for upstream collection of data and creating the basis for decision makers.
- OpenIMIS platform (an open source insurance management platform (Uwe Wahser, GIZ Nepal)
- SORMAS Digital Surveillance and Outbreak Management, GIZ Nigeria and Ghana
- community-level care (e.g. the Community Health Toolkit, CommCare, etc.)
- primary care (e.g. OpenSRP)
- secondary/tertiary care (e.g. OpenMRS, Bahmni, etc.)
- health commodities, pharmaceutical and supply chain (e.g. OpenLMIS)
- health workforce (e.g. iHRIS)
- health financing (e.g. OpenIMIS)
- One Health surveillance Platform at FIND. https://www.finddx.org/newsroom/pr-03feb20/
- open standards and interoperability architecture, to connect all of these components (e.g. OpenHIE.)
In addition
- open source solutions such as the VistA EHR platform,
- standards and technology platforms such as OpenEHR,
- commercial platforms such as Cerner or Epic.
Challenges
- identify the need of the user group
- being scalable
- address the global market
- ensure privacy
- ....
References
- ↑ Chanaka Fernando, Building a digital health platform with open source software, https://medium.com/@chanakaudaya/building-a-digital-health-platform-with-open-source-software-3d65aaad1987
