Intentional Innovation for Realizing Sustainable Digital Health Architecture at Scale

For digital health to be successful, its supporting architecture should be easy to implement, operationalize, and maintain over time. This begs the question if the current standard for digital health architecture inherently supports or inhibits reaching the goal of stronger health systems and improved healthcare delivery. Vital Wave would like to propose to look ahead to what the field should strategically think about in the next three-to-five-year period in terms of digital architecture. Through this presentation, the firm will discuss current inherent design inefficiencies and challenges such as establishing and maintaining system integrations, governing sources of truth, reducing the burden of data collection for health workers, and lack of an evidence base. This will be paired with specific examples of architecture redesign that could further address the current bottlenecks and challenges the field is facing. For instance, this could include a unified interface approach which would reframe the approach to digital health architecture around the user and present a unified interface for collection and interaction of data (while still recognizing the need for specific health program data), such that every user (e.g., health worker) has a single interface that corresponds with their specific workflows. Another example could be to replace the central repositories that store different data types (e.g., patients, labs, supplies) with a more distributed digital ecosystem of localized repositories, where end-to-end solutions operating within health facilities don't share standardized data types with central repositories but rather respond to queries made from central authority. The goal of this panel is to help provide a systemic and critical forward-looking conversation for the digital health field, using digital health architecture as the starting point.