Digital Health in the African Region Should be Integral to the Health System’s Strengthening

Weak health systems contribute to mortality and other poor health outcomes across low-income and middle-income countries. 1,2Countries in the World Health Organization (WHO) African region experience common and crosscutting issues of health care including but not limited to the availability of human resources for health, 3 a high burden of disease (malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and noncommunicable diseases), poor health system organization and referrals, lack of essential medicines and supplies, access to health facilities and associated factors such as long waiting for times, 4 lack of and poor diagnostics, 5 high costs, loss to follow-up, poor training on technologies, and lack of medical equipment.Digital health, interchangeably described as eHealth, could contribute to better patient outcomes by harnessing and using health resources, information, and technologies for healthcare analysis, delivery, management, and planning. 6,7Investment in eHealth could strengthen the health systems, extend services in hard-to-reach areas, and reduce wastage of health resources.eHealth encompasses but is not limited to mhealth or telemedicine, and includes technologies such as the internet of things (IoT), advanced computing, big data analytics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), artificial intelligence (AI) including machine learning (Figure 1). 6However, their implementation in the public sector in African settings is still sub-optimal.This includes innovative use of data, information and communication technologies, and human capacity.The emergence of eHealth strategies