Help countries achieve Health SDGs by building digital public goods that strengthen public health.
The DIGIT Health platform is being built as an open source Digital Public Good to expand capabilities in public health. It is being designed to work across countries at varying levels of capacity and complexity.
The focus is to help countries reduce “diseases of poverty.” The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that such diseases “account for 45% of the disease burden in the poorest countries” and stem from poor nutrition and sanitation, absence of health education, and indoor air pollution. We want to help countries reduce this by building digital tools on top of eGov’s open-source platform - the Digital Infrastructure for Governance, Impact & Transformation (DIGIT) - to enable and manage health campaigns, and disease surveillance.
As platform adoption increases over time, it will continue to generate more real-time and authoritative data in the public health space, besides ingesting data from other sources. The platform will become a “shared source of truth” that all stakeholders can use to align resources and decisions to achieve operational and financial efficiency. The platform will therefore progressively and greatly improve the ability of low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) to better manage the delivery of public health priorities.
Public health challenges are massive and complex. While many countries have limited capacity and resources to address such issues, the current approach to these challenges tends to strictly focus on delivering one specific outcome, driven by specific nodal agencies. Each programme ends up replicating the same set of efforts and outputs. For example, health campaigns are typically categorised as per the diseases they aim to address - malaria, polio, etc. Each programme involves a similar set of activities: planning, delivery and logistics, human resource management, monitoring and reporting. They suffer from low effectiveness due to the siloed and uncoordinated way in which they are funded, planned, executed, and monitored.
Current digital efforts do not take a “whole of system view” and do not solve the cost of coordination and duplication issues. Each program also develops its own systems (MIS, apps, dashboards). Such siloed, solution-centric approaches and tools create a new set of problems and inefficiencies for countries:
Higher costs and time: This is incurred on creating or procuring and maintaining these systems, including the onboarding cost of the same actors in each programme.
Data exists in multiple systems: They are not interoperable, leading to duplication, inconsistencies, poor adoption by on-ground workers, and sub-optimal decision-making.
Limited reusability and innovation: Data and capabilities are intertwined and ‘locked,’ making it extremely hard for the wider ecosystem to innovate and build upon.
Sub-scale: The tools are not able to scale for the national population and across programmes.
The DIGIT Health platform reimagines the public health space as a set of horizontal building blocks, such as shared registries, and services, accessible through well-defined open APIs, which can be leveraged by multiple countries and disease programmes. It will eliminate the above inefficiencies. Further, it will facilitate the independent evolution of each building block and participation by the health ecosystem, leading to faster innovation.
The DIGIT Health platform is being designed to enable delivery at scale, across various aspects of public health, and multiple country contexts. Using the platform approach, we will create an end-to-end flexible, open, configurable, and reusable platform to plan, manage and run any public health program such as health campaigns so there is detailed and timely monitoring and evaluation to review coverage, target achievement and identification of gaps for their distribution.
Re-usable: Shared data registries and infrastructure
Interoperable: Open API specifications
Secure and scalable
Multi-country support: Support for infrastructure isolation, as well as data isolation
Multi-lingual: Support for multiple languages
DIGIT Health platform will:
Allow ecosystem actors to use, contribute and evolve the platform collaboratively and sustainably.
Give the option to ecosystems to either host it on their own infrastructure or use it from a hosted environment (hosted by a trusted party) for which a sustainable costing and financial model will be evolved.
The common services and shared data registries can be reused to assemble products that provide a unified and consistent experience for each set of actors. The programme-specific context such as roles, workflows, and notifications can be configured by the respective programs, enabling faster rollout and execution.
The APIs will allow data and functionality to be reused across multiple departments, effectively breaking silos across programs. Through APIs, meaningful data and services can also be made available to the various ecosystem stakeholders for innovation and interoperate with other systems like MOSIP, DHIS2, Sunbird RC, DIVOC, etc. that are focused on other parts of the public health delivery value chain, such as disease surveillance, supply chain, verifiable certificates, and health insurance.
The platform is designed to facilitate stakeholders with a digital system to manage and implement health campaign activities in Mozambique. Click here to know more.
Find the Product Capability Roadmap below:
Timelines
Q2 2023 (w/c May 15, 2023): Field testing
TBD: Tentative - 2023-end.
Tentative Q1 24
Value bundle
Value delivered
Feature list
Feature list
Feature list
Feature list
Campaign setup
Enable system administrators and program managers to set up the platform quickly, easily configure roles and role-based permissions, update master data, and manage users.
1. Campaign manager: Create and update campaigns (single round campaigns). 2. User management with UI. 3. Out-of-the-box standard dashboards.
1. Campaign manager with support for multi-round campaigns. 2. Forms engine.
1. Campaign manager with UI. 2. UI for setting up custom dashboards. 3. Forms designer with UI.
1. Mobile Device Management
Service delivery
Mobile app with a user-friendly design and easy, intuitive navigation. This will guide the field teams to easily register eligible beneficiaries, and deliver the healthcare intervention with built-in checks that enforce data collection protocols and validations to avoid data entry errors.
1. Register new households and individuals. 2. Search registered beneficiaries from the list. 3. Update service delivery information against a beneficiary. 4. Decision support for the resource delivery of LLIN's. 5. Creation of household and individual registries. 6. Re-use beneficiary data from the registries.
1. Proximity-based search using GIS map on the mobile app. 2. Routing assistance to locate beneficiaries. 3. Support voucher generation and scanning for tracking service delivery. 4. Last-mile delivery tracking: Record stock received from the warehouse for delivery. 5. Adverse events reporting. 6. Enhance decision support logic for MDA campaigns.
1. Beneficiary eligibility checker. 2. Generation of due lists for multi-round campaigns. 3. In-app alerts and reminders to improve medication adherence.
Inventory management
Mobile app that enables the warehouse manager to capture the inflow and outflow of resources from the warehouse and monitor delivery data against consumption data to identify potential stock outs, wastage, fraud, as well as take corrective action.
1. Record stock receipts and issues. 2. Stock reconciliation to view the balance stock on hand.
Consumables management
Dashboards and reports
Enable programme managers, supervisors and frontline workers to view key performance indicators for assessing campaign efficiency and effectiveness before, during, and after the campaign via near real-time dashboards and pre-emptive alerts for course corrections.
1. Offline mobile reports to view task completion and campaign coverage. 2. Offline mobile reports to asses the performance of frontline teams. 3. Out-of-the-box online web dashboard to view campaign coverage and efficiency indicators. 4. Export tabular reports from web dashboards.
1. Automate preemptive email/SMS notifications. 2. Automate report generation.
Configure rule-based alerts on dashboards with enhanced predictive analytics.
1. Online GIS-enabled web dashboards for real-time monitoring 2. Dashboard with basic rule-based prescriptive analytical support.
Training
Enable programme managers and supervisors to track training progress, evaluate training attendees and provide on-demand refreshers to attendees. Ensure that the campaign staff is equipped and trained to perform their duties efficiently.
1. Capture PII, bank details and performance data of hired campaign staff for longitudinal tracking. 2. Creation of the staff registry.
1. UI to find and hire campaign staff from the staff registry to enable better skill-requirement match. 2. On-demand access to job-aids.
1. Training refreshers. 2. Pre and post evaluation of the training. 3. Track the status of the training sessions.
Payments
Enable programme managers to decrease the time to pay frontline workers while increasing financial accountability and reducing fraud.
1. Manage attendance for the campaign staff. 2. View payment due for services delivered.
1. Automate invoice generation for incentive payments. 2. Automate payment to campaign staff 3. Track status of payment processing. 4. Send notification on payment completion.
SBCC/demand generation
Enable programme managers, frontline workers and citizens to easily access and receive SBCC messages digitally to improve disease awareness and decrease refusals.
1. On-demand access to IEC material within the mobile app.
1. Broadcast SMS for one-way messaging to beneficiaries. 2. Post service delivery surveys.
Grievances and complaints
Enable programme managers and supervisors to ensure speedy and efficient resolution of complaints while providing them with an intuitive system that helps to initiate corrective actions in a timely manner.
1. Log grievances/complaints. 2. Manage complaints: View and resolve complaints. 3. Dashboards for viewing complaints and grievances.
1. Assign complaints to the appropriate actor for resolution. 2. Track the status of complaints. 3. Notification on complaint resolution.
1. Automatic prioritization of complaints from the list. 2. Auto-routing and escalation of complaints.
Planning
Enable programme managers to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the planning process by leveraging GIS systems and data from other sources to create planning templates that make it easy to generate, validate and share micro-plans.
Micro-planning: Template for capturing targets from the micro-plans.
Workflow management.
1. Macro-planning: Estimating population numbers and resource requirements. 2. Micro-planning: Input based template to generate micro-plans. 3. Micro-planning: Workflow to share micro-plans for reviews and approvals. 4. Micro-planning: Track the status of the micro-planning activity.
GIS-enabled micro-planning using digital maps.
Supervision
Enable supervisors to to track the campaign staff's adherence to campaign SOP's and protocols and record inspection details.
Submit supervision checklists.
In-app notifications to the field teams.
WhatsApp integration to enable a two-way communication.
Offline capability
Enable frontline teams to collect data in low and no internet areas.
1. Data collection in low/no internet areas. 2. Enable location services while offline to track GPS coordinates.
Peer-to-peer sync.
User experience delighters
Enable all frontline workers to do their best work by providing a feature set in the mobile application that enables the app to act as a co-pilot to help the user perform their tasks while improving technology adoption.
1. In-app walkthrough of the application. 2. Progress bar to monitor the work status. 3. Multi-language support. 4. Call help desk: SOS button.
Interoperability and integration
Enable the adoption of the HCM platform by allowing a hassle-free integration of the capabilities with widely-used applications.
Integration with DHIS2.
1. Interoperability with FHIR for data exchange. 2. Supply chain management: Integration with OpenLMIS. 3. Integration with other visualization tools like PowerBI, and Tableau. 4. Integration with Reveal.
Citizen's portal
Registration 1. Self-Registration for campaigns. 2. Appointment scheduling and booking.
