What is Digital Health?
The healthcare sector is increasingly recognizing the transformative power of digital technologies. Governments around the world are investing in digital health to improve patient outcomes, enhance healthcare delivery, and optimize resources. Investments in digital health can support progress towards universal health coverage and improve people's overall wellbeing.
A growing number of countries are developing national digital health strategies and implementation roadmaps to prioritize and coordinate the rapid growth of digital technologies used across the health sector. To support governments no matter where they are in their digital health journey, the World Bank created the Digital Health Blueprint Toolkit to help governments develop a roadmap to implement their digital health strategy.
Overview of the Toolkit
The Digital Health Blueprint Toolkit is a comprehensive set of customizable resources designed to help country governments move from digital health strategy to implementation by focusing on the development of buildable blueprints contextualized to country health priorities. Though some countries may have a blueprint or health information exchange (HIE) design, they are often high-level schematics that fall short in translating specifically how to construct the levels of their digital health architecture.
In addition, the toolkit includes guidance to develop an investment rationale for the full implementation of a digital health blueprint over a ten-year period. The investment rationale provides information not only for resource allocation planning, but also illustrates when countries can expect to see health outcome improvement from investment in a digital health architecture.
The best place to start learning about this Toolkit is the Digital Health Blueprint Toolkit Overview (PDF).
This version of the Toolkit is being made available to encourage use and collect feedback for this resource. To provide feedback please contact: WB_Digital_Health_Blueprints@worldbank.org
