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.
About the author
Sara Jervingsarajerving
Sara Jerving is a Senior Reporter at Devex, where she covers global health. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, VICE News, and Bloomberg News among others. Sara holds a master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she was a Lorana Sullivan fellow. She was a finalist for One World Media's Digital Media Award in 2021; a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in 2018; and she was part of a VICE News Tonight on HBO team that received an Emmy nomination in 2018. She received the Philip Greer Memorial Award from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2014.
