Digital Public Infrastructure for Health: Charting a path to implementation in LMIC health systems

This report was produced by Vital Wave with thought partnership from Digital Square at PATH and support from Co-Develop.

A framework for conceptualizing digital public infrastructure for health (DPI-H)

The next decade of global digital health has the potential to greatly accelerate the achievement of sustainable, scaled, interoperable digital health systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), while laying the foundation for emerging capabilities like predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) and enabling their use in these contexts. This report maps out a pathway toward realizing these possibilities through an infrastructural approach to digital health investments. Rather than focusing on specific digital health interventions, an infrastructural investment approach prioritizes a subset of digital systems and services that act as the foundation for many priority use cases in digital health, today and in the future. This infrastructure-focused approach enables an ecosystem of innovators, implementers, and governments in gaining efficiency by leveraging a common set of open, widely scaled, relatively basic digital functions for health systems.

This report, produced by Vital Wave with thought partnership from Digital Square at PATH and support from Co-Develop, offers a framework for conceptualizing digital public infrastructure for health (DPI-H) that is grounded in priority digital health interventions. It analyzes current challenges and gaps in the landscape to develop investment approaches that can generate conditions for implementations of DPI-H to succeed.