The push to standardize digital health

In the past, community health workers in low-and-middle-income countries would go door to door with a paper notebook, gathering health information from people in their community, such as whether a child in the household has been immunized, tally that information, and send it to the government.

And while there’s been a large push to digitize health care systems, in many circumstances digitizing health care has created new problems — different donors and organizations come in with a host of mobile applications and different systems for collecting information. This can be confusing and burdensome for health workers who need to juggle between applications and paper records aimed at addressing different issues.

A leading discussion at the Global Digital Health Forum last week in Nairobi was the need to make digital health more integrated and interoperable, and to work toward everyone using the same standards and guidelines. The conference was held for the first time in Africa — it’s usually hosted in Washington, D.C.