DIGITAL SQUARE ELEVATES COUNTRY PRIORITIES AND STRENGTHENS REGIONAL AND NATIONAL CAPACITY TO ALIGN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION EFFORTS.
Digital Square’s national and regional partnerships have helped identify three overarching priorities for capacity strengthening:
Diversify the ecosystem by supporting local digital health entrepreneurs to partner with existing global goods developers. Digital health global goods provide an affordable foundation for digital health transformation that in-country entrepreneurs and governments can adapt and use. Digital Square supports easier development of localized versions of global goods and connects local entrepreneurs to global goods communities to help them build thriving businesses.
Provide training and guidance to equip health leaders with the necessary skills and knowledge to drive country digital transformation of health systems. Strengthening digital health capacity across all levels of the health workforce is key to the effective implementation, scale-up, and long-term sustainability of digital health systems. Digital Square supports health leaders and decision-making governing bodies—through trainings, workshops, and resources—in their journey to establish and lead regional and country efforts that leverage the power and promise of digital health.
Offer technical assistance to regional and country digital health leaders as they lead and execute digital health transformation. Digital Square supports country leaders with end-to-end digital health implementation strategy development. This includes, but is not limited to, assisting countries with tool selection, advising on enterprise architecture, supporting the development of health policies, budgeting, and curating and publishing country-specific toolkits. Through these technical advisory services, and our partnerships with governments and ministries of health, we aim to strengthen all layers of the health system including policies, standards, and governance.
Capacity Strengthening in Action
Diversifying the Ecosystem
Organizational capacity assessment tool
Download the OCAT
Digital Square developed an Organizational Capacity Assessment Tool (OCAT) for organizations that wish to localize, adapt, and implement global goods. Piloted in partnership with the Digital Health Ecosystem (DHE) project, the OCAT was developed to support Digital Square’s technical partners and the broader digital health ecosystem of partners by assessing their ability to implement relevant and innovative programming effectively, transparently, and sustainably. It provides a framework for organizations to conduct assessments that can be used to identify strengths and develop plans to enhance capacity in priority areas.
Learn more about DHE: Catalytic funding from Bayer Foundation to accelerate digital health entrepreneurship in LMICs | PATH
value proposition of localized global goods for health
Digital Square is conducting research on the value proposition of standards-based and open-source solutions for health, the associated enablers and barriers, and the effect of primary clients on the demand for standards-based solutions.
Training and Guidance
Digital Health Applied Leadership Program
The Digital Health Applied Leadership Program is a 12-month program designed to prepare participants to successfully create and execute digital health transformation initiatives for health systems strengthening.
Learn more: Supporting the next generation of digital health leaders in Africa
The Digital Health: Planning National Systems course is designed to empower ministry leadership with the technical concepts and planning tools necessary to steer and orient national digital health stakeholders.
Learn more: Empowering country health leaders to plan digital systems for COVID-19 and beyond
FHIR® Webinar Series
Digital Square hosts a series of webinars for knowledge sharing and continued learning to support implementation teams’ widespread development and understanding of FHIR and other industry standards and best practices. Our FHIR standard series includes:
FHIR Foundational Series: These sessions provide a comprehensive review of the fundamentals of FHIR, how it works, and supports interoperability in healthcare. These sessions are helpful for beginners who want to become familiar with FHIR.
FHIR webinar series: These next-level webinars take a deep dive into the more complex facets of FHIR. These webinars cover various implementation aspects and showcase some exciting work that the Digital Square global goods innovators have already done. These sessions are helpful to those with prior experience in implementing FHIR.
FHIR-side chats: These series are accompanied by monthly, audience-led discussions, which allow partners to engage more deeply on the topic, pose questions to experts, and establish connections to the broader FHIR community.
French FHIR Foundational Series: Our current series of FHIR webinars will feature the Foundational Series in French. These webinars will introduce the FHIR standard. This series started in March 2023 and will continue through June 2023, accompanied by FHIR-side chats in French.
The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF®) training
TOGAF certification enables professionals to design, evaluate, and build the right architecture for organizations. Digital Square facilitates TOGAF trainings to support digital health leaders in either managing their current architecture or developing a new enterprise architecture plan.
Technical Assistance
Digital Health Center of Excellence (DICE)
DICE delivers agile and coordinated assistance to national governments and partners for the sustainable and scalable deployment of carefully chosen mature digital health solutions. Digital Square supports DICE through the implementation of global goods for microplanning led by the UNICEF-WHO Geographic Information Systems working group, staffing for technical assistance requests from DICE countries, and the development of facility registries, ecosystem mapping, and other requests as needed. Learn more.
U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) Digital Community Health Initiative
Digital Square partners with the PMI Digital Community Health Initiative to strengthen the quality of healthcare delivery in PMI partner countries by investing in the scale-up of digitally enabled community health platforms. Country profiles generated through this work share best practices and lessons learned within PMI-supported countries to understand how digital technologies are used for community-based case management, as well as for data collection, reporting, and decision-making.