Summary
The Standardisation Guide presents several digital health (DH) artefacts including; digital health Standards, digital health Enterprise Architecture Framework, digital health Workforce Capacity Building Framework, and digital health Monitoring and Evaluation Framework (DH-ASK). The DH-ASK artefacts will be used to standardise digitally-enabled healthcare and services in Uganda's health system.
Standardisation of the DH-ASK artefacts was derived from the requirements of an exploratory landscape study for digital health in Uganda's Health System. The landscape analysis provided an understanding of the challenges that impeded digital health standardisation and data-use-for-action in Uganda's health system. Whereas standardisation has been considered a remedy to digital health challenges in many countries; conversely, the digital health standardisation ground is troubled with numerous challenges, including a huge number of available standards, that compete, overlap and sometimes contradict one another; worse still, many of the available standards do not have implementation guidelines, which makes their implementation quite a difficult task. As such, adopting international digital health standards normally requires significant localisation to meet specific requirements of that country such as Uganda.
The digital health Enterprise Architecture Framework aims to define the “how and what” different digital health resources work together to optimise the delivery of healthcare and services. The digital health Standards aim to provide common rules, principles, and guidelines for the use of various digital health interventions in Uganda's health system. The digital health Monitoring and Evaluation Framework aims to assess the results and impact of digital health interventions. The digital health Workforce Capacity Building Framework aims to define standardised digital health workers' skills, knowledge and appreciation of digital health in work practices.