Empowering country health leaders to plan digital systems for COVID-19 and beyond
By: Abdul Basith Shaukath, Technical Program Officer, Digital Square at PATH, and Amanda Srsic, Communications Consultant, Digital Square at PATH
As countries respond to COVID-19 and move from pandemic to potentially endemic status—and as countries incorporate COVID-19 vaccines into their routine immunization programs—there is an increasing need to further develop digital solutions and ensure interoperability with existing digital systems. While many of these systems existed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, gaps in information, such as the distribution of target populations, have caused delays in vaccination delivery.
This reality underscores how digital systems have untapped potential to support countries’ COVID-19 response and strengthen health and immunization systems for the future. In operationalizing COVID-19 pandemic response plans, the Digital Health Centre of Excellence (DICE) has been deploying technical assistance to ministries of health. This multi-agency consortium co-led by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) launched in the spring of 2021 to provide direct support for the adaptation, scale, and sustainable deployment of digital health solutions, with the goal of ensuring more equitable coverage of high-quality health services. While these solutions have direct and urgent applications for the ongoing COVID-19 response, they also have the capacity to strengthen countries’ health and immunization systems more broadly.
DICE course equipped countries with digital skills for COVID-19 and beyond
In September 2022, DICE launched the delivery of a course that aimed to equip health leaders with the skills necessary to lead digital health systems planning in their countries, resulting in scalable, sustainable, and interoperable systems. The 12-week “Digital Health: Planning National Systems'' online course was developed to empower ministry leadership with the technical concepts and planning tools necessary to steer and orient national digital health stakeholders. The course welcomed more than 150 health leaders from 22 countries who represented ministries of health, ministries of information and communications technology, and regional and country offices of UNICEF and WHO. Funding for the first cohort of the course was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to strengthen local capacity in digital health.
The curriculum included a series of learning modules on health system strengthening and the national digital health planning process as well as a final group capstone project. Teams had the flexibility to design their own project based on their country's health system needs or select a project from a list of suggestions. Projects were organized around different focus areas and competencies that teams could choose to focus on based on their country’s priorities.
Modules taught as part of the Digital Health: Planning National Systems course. Source: TechChange 2022.
Inaugural cohort successfully completed the course and gained relevant learnings
To date, 75 health leaders have celebrated their course completion. Participants acquired a range of technical skills related to digital health system strengthening, such as landscaping the enabling environment and creating a digital health strategy. In the context of COVID-19, this course empowered learners working in teams with the skills necessary to plan and implement health systems for COVID-19 vaccine distribution and service delivery use cases for scalability, sustainability, and interoperability. Participants also learned how to scale digital health interventions beyond the COVID-19 response for broader health system strengthening.
Based on the results of a post-course evaluation, participants’ understanding of and confidence in practicing digital health concepts have increased substantially across all digital health concepts reviewed. The following three concepts emerged as the topics participants felt both most knowledgeable and confident about: health systems; health system challenges, bottlenecks, and pain points; and digital health interventions. Across all concepts, participants learned the most about digital health policies, regulations, and compliance, and gained the most confidence in understanding and leveraging global goods. As Evans Lablah, a UNICEF Immunization Specialist in Liberia, shared, “I now feel ready and prepared to share the knowledge I’ve acquired, and I’m more confident talking about digital health.”
Photo: Courtesy of Evans Lablah.
“I now feel ready and prepared to share the knowledge I’ve acquired, and I’m more confident talking about digital health.”
At the conclusion of the course, participants shared that the course environment promoted networking, relationship building, and conversations that led to tangible ideas, strategies, and solutions for national digital health efforts. Alex Y. Colee, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer for Liberia’s Ministry of Health, remarked, “The group activities promoted peer-to-peer connection with colleagues locally but also promoted cross-learning with colleagues from other countries.” Mohammad Eswady bin Brahim from Brunei’s Ministry of Health reflected, “Discussion for the final project [seemed] to bring up a lot of issues [about] our current system. [It was] very helpful for us to identify potential projects to be done.”
Participants praise course for developing their skills needed to advance national digital health efforts
Almost all participants reported that they would use the information discussed in the course again, with greater than 70 percent noting that they were very likely to use it again. They plan to apply their learnings in a myriad of ways:
Nearly 80 percent plan to serve as a resource on their team for digital health support.
More than 60 percent plan to advocate for the enterprise planning approach, a process where organizations assess how their information systems currently work, how they could be better used to reach their goals, and the steps needed to implement the required changes.
More than half plan to implement activities that support the establishment of an enterprise architecture.
An officer of health information, research, and innovation in Nigeria remarked, “I enrolled in this course because I was encountering challenges as to the best way to achieve enterprise architecture and standards implementation… [This] course helped to fix the puzzle and empowered me on the potential actions we could take as a country to surmount our challenges.”
Empowering learners through a thoughtfully designed and hands-on curriculum
This course’s success is due in part to the rigorous curriculum co-designed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Digital Square, and TechChange. To develop the curriculum, the partners compiled content from WHO and the International Telecommunications Union as well as an existing course, the Digital Health Leadership Training. They also tailored the information to this course using an agile approach, which entailed piloting and consistently updating the course based on feedback from the target audience and subject matter experts from around the world.
Prior to DICE’s course delivery, TechChange conducted an ideation workshop to further adapt this existing course for the DICE audience, contextualizing the content so learners could rapidly apply it to their work in response to the pandemic. Attended by colleagues from Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Digital Square, UNICEF, USAID, and WHO, the ideation workshop generated ideas for refining the capstone projects and target learner profiles. This effort culminated in an updated curriculum that comprised a mix of self-paced reading, videos, quizzes, live activity sessions, and a final group project that enabled course participants to develop an enterprise planning approach for digital health.
Looking ahead for the DICE course
A self-paced version of the course is also available, and DICE is using it to share the material with increasingly wider audiences. Next month, TechChange will launch a Community of Practice for alumni to maintain momentum from the course and continue supporting cross-country collaboration and knowledge sharing.
This course was initially delivered in English, but there are plans to deliver future versions of the course for French-, Spanish-, and Portuguese-speaking audiences in 2023.
About DICE
DICE was founded as a mechanism to deliver agile and coordinated technical assistance to governments on digital health solutions. DICE’s goal is to ensure more equitable coverage of quality health services, including vaccines, maternal and child health services, and nutrition investments through increased use of data and evidence.
This multi-agency initiative provides coordinated technical assistance to national governments and partners on digital health interventions that address health priorities in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as post-pandemic health system needs, such as the following:
Coordinated technical assistance to countries to support sustainable and scalable deployment of carefully chosen andmature digital health solutions for planning distribution of medicines and vaccines.
Support for service delivery and supply management.
Epidemiological surveillance and case detection.
Monitoring coverage of service uptake and training of health workers.
Communication with the general population to generate demand and reduce misinformation.
For more information, please visit www.digitalhealthcoe.org.