LMICs are rapidly moving towards and wanting a holistic view of their population’s health and with eHealth strategies being revised to ensure that interoperability and data exchange are strongly included. To date, there has been a trend of “isolated” digital health intervention focus such as “management of malaria”, “HIV treatment” or “MNCH” with little to no focus on data exchange between these interventions. This leaves countries with uncoordinated interventions that are not exchanging data and, in the end, fragmented health systems. Digital Square launched 3 years ago as a partnership of 40 organizations working together to solve three well-known barriers to scale in digital health of which this is one. Recognizing that there are existing tools and technologies, seen as global goods, which are supporting many of the countries Digital Square launched the global goods maturity model and has encouraged existing tools to “raise their bar” to better serve their country needs. This session will unpack the Digital Square technical investment strategy. A strategy that is positioned to create the opportunity to build the infrastructure to support connected digital health in low resource settings. The strategy leverages existing investments into the concepts of interoperability and data exchange, such as OpenHIE, IHE and HL7 FHIR, to create the “highways” to support the exchange of health care and create a roadmap for Global Goods to leverage.

Advancements in digital technology have provided ample opportunity for the health sector to share and use tools and other resources to build and sustain systems for high-quality health data. The creation and initial implementation of such resources is often an exciting time; however, challenges remain in ensuring that such collaboratively created resources continue to be curated and available to the global public after their incubation. This panel will explore the technical, financial, and practical aspects of this issue by presenting examples of current opportunities and challenges. Panelists: MEASURE Evaluation (Liz Millar) will discuss issues of sustainability from a project perspective. For years, the USAID-funded MEASURE Evaluation project has maintained a website dedicated to open access to global tools and resources for health information system (HIS) strengthening, such as the Interoperability Maturity Toolkit, and Stages of Continuous Improvement Toolkit. Now the project faces questions about how to ensure that these resources remain accessible to the public when the project closes in 2020. Digital Square (Maguette Ndong) will describe Digital Square’s commitment to reusable, adaptable technology solutions and the creation of an open-source hub for housing digital health resources. Using the DSpace instance, this hub will catalog resources from MEASURE Evaluation, the K4Health project, and the Global Digital Health Network. However, questions remain about how best to transfer and catalog resources and how to curate them to stay relevant, driving them to the right audiences and ensuring that efforts are not duplicated. USAID (Adele Waugaman) will discuss opportunities, challenges, and considerations in the creation and sustainment of global tools and resource for the digital health community, focusing on the example of sustaining the work of the Digital Health & Interoperability Working Group. As USAID supports countries in their journey to self-reliance, global public goods must remain widely accessible. Moderator: K4Health representative (TBD)