The Global Digital Health Index 2019

The Global Digital Health Index and Maturity Model was developed as a tool to help countries benchmark and monitor their investments in digital health over time, through enhanced data use and visibility into health systems. The GDHI is an interactive digital resource for tracking, monitoring and evaluating the strategic usage of digital technology for health across countries.
 
The GDHI’s maturity model provides a roadmap for each country’s digital health growth, by recognising the diversity existing in each phase of digital health development. Using a capability-based approach, the GDHI identifies 5 phases of development, corresponding to the different capability sets, thereby, allowing countries to identify and improve specific weaknesses.
 
Most countries seem to lack the enablers required to maximise the benefits of and investments in digital health, for improvement in health outcomes. This lack of visibility hampers the maturity of digital health due to the existence of persistent fragmentation and inefficiencies at the national and sub-national level.
 
For this purpose, the inaugural State of Digital Health 2019 report provides an unprecedented snapshot of the digital health ecosystems of 22 countries across 6 different regions of the world. It analyses emerging trends, sets benchmarks for consideration and contextualises findings in relation to digital health milestones and global trends, for charting future growth. The report also lays the foundation for better-informed and coordinated investments in digital health. This report is also intended to catalyse other countries to contribute their data to the Index, to make future analyses more comprehensive and actionable.
 
Thus, the report uses 7 categories of indicators to track the progress in digital health, with 5 different criteria under each category. The categories include: leadership and governance; strategy and investment; legislation, policy and compliance; workforce; standards of interoperability; infrastructure; services and applications.

The GDHI Theory of Change
In striving to raise the bar in the field of digital health, the GDHI is largely driven by a theory of change and use cases, which are prioritized through a participatory design, development, and testing process involving a broad range of government, private sector, academic, NGO, and other key digital health stakeholders from around the world.

Findings of the report

• The average global maturity of the digital health ecosystem is in Phase 3 out of 5
• The strongest component measured under the GDHI is leadership and governance
• The two weakest areas are: standards and interoperability and digital health workforce development
• The lack of national digital health infrastructures, exchanges of health information and data standards, in countries throughout the world, lead to slowed progress in the digital health space
• The African countries demand specific focus on investment given that they are lagging in global averages
• The Southeast Asian and Western Pacific regions have more mature digital health ecosystems than other regions, with a score of 4 out of 5 on the GDHI’s maturity model

The underlying idea is to motivate global leaders with a unified call to action: to improve the data for existing digital health ecosystems and provide clear pathways for improving them. In order to build robust digital health ecosystems, it is imperative that all countries participate in the Index, as the first step towards progress.
 
All information for this article has been sourced from here.
 
India Outbound
May 24, 2019
 
 

source https://indiaoutbound.org/the-global-digital-health-index-2019/