Digitizing Population Health in Low-Resource Settings

The rapid development of digital technologies provides fundamentally new ways of addressing pressing public health challenges, especially around understanding population health status, strengthening the collection and use of health data to inform public health policies and plan interventions, and strengthening health systems to advance disease prevention, health promotion, and health service delivery. This course introduces foundational concepts in digitization of population health data and programs, with the aim to support decision-making around the appropriate ecosystem for digitizing health data, the key stakeholders who should be engaged for effective digitization and strategies for implementing and scaling digitization efforts to strengthen population health programs. The course discusses special considerations for digitization within low-bandwidth, and low-resource environments and leverages case studies from low and middle-income country settings to orient learners to key concepts. In this course, you will learn: 1. Describe key components of an enabling ecosystem for digitization of population health programs (i.e., leadership and governance; strategy and investment; services and applications; standards and interoperability; infrastructure; legislation, policy, and compliance; and workforce). 2. Discuss the major global initiatives, frameworks, and resources available to support digitization of population health programs and key considerations when using these. 3. Understand how to promote digital ecosystem readiness and the use of maturity models in measuring readiness. 4. Explain key considerations when digitizing population health programs, such as principles of user-centered design, designing for sustainability and scale, and privacy and security of health data. 5. Describe the gender and equity considerations when developing tools and platforms for digital transformation in population health programs, including ways to promote equality and equity. 6. Introduce emerging approaches to the digitization of population health programs, including the use of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, and critically examine their potential value, limitations, and implications for decision-making, equity, and health system performance. The course is targeted at public health program planners, policymakers, and implementers who are engaged in decision-making around when and how to digitize population health programs. Learners do not need a technology or an engineering background or experience.