Harmonized Digital Health Transformation: A Pilot Initiative in Luanda's Healthcare System

Intervention

Social or environmental challenge

Despite investment by government and others in the hospital sector, there are high implementation costs, inconsistency in quality standards, a lack of coordination by health professionals and resistance from service providers. The proposed Digital Health Platform (DHP) directly addresses these inefficiencies. The adoption of open-source software will mitigate high expenses by introducing a system that can be scaled and customized according to the realities of the hospitals. By prioritizing low bandwidth usage, the project caters to areas with poor internet infrastructure. The establishment of a Community of Practice offers sustained support, promoting collaboration and ensuring continual improvements. The DHP's modular nature promotes customization, shifting from a disease-specific paradigm to a holistic, person-centered approach, enhancing the user experience and its integration with primary health care units will allow for greater coordination and referral management. Through documentation and the development of manuals, the market will be able to replicate this in Angola.

Description of the intervention

WHO and the Ministry of Health aim to implement a Digital Health Platform (DHP) aimed at harmonizing digitization in healthcare services, emphasizing a quality-of-care approach to hospital services and establishing national standard guidelines on the digitization of quality of care. The project is designed to be piloted in a small hospital in Luanda, Angola and will be documented academically by the Private University of Angola.
The DHP is a facility-wide end-to-end digital solution that enables users to collect, analyze and interpret clinical information. The platform can be manipulated to fit the hospital across different service delivery levels. The platform has several modules that enable users to easily enter, retrieve and analyze data.
The project also includes the development of manuals and guidelines allowing any stakeholder to effectively replicate the DHP thus improving its scalability and its importance. A similar platform has been developed by WHO’s regional office and this project would be guided by its implementation.
It is an opportunity to modernize healthcare in Angola, with a view to seeking additional funding to scale the project if successful. The collaboration and focus on open-source solutions and community-driven support make it a viable and promising initiative for the Angolan healthcare system.

Last data update

Data for this pipeline project was last updated in August 2023