Improving Health, Connecting People: the Role of ICTs in the Health Sector of Developing Countries

This paper attempts to describe constraints and challenges of using information and communications technology (ICT) in the health sector of developing countries. The paper focuses on the following areas of health impact:

• Improved information dissemination and facilitated public dialogue around major health issues;
• Enabled remote consultation, diagnosis, and treatment through telemedicine;
• Facilitated collaboration and cooperation among health workers;
• Supported more effective health research and access to research;
• Strengthened ability to monitor incidence of public health threats; and
• Improved administrative efficiency of care systems.

The paper provides a broad introduction to ICTs as tools for helping to reach Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the health sector and explores their potential and actual use. It then highlights major constraints and challenges and identifies emerging technologies that may shape future ICT use in health, particularly extending the reach of the health system to rural settings and increasing citizen involvement.

Results from this research show that successful strategies are those that foster equitable access to ICTs, support their meaningful use, and encourage community and user self-empowerment, rather than simply provide ICTs as tools.

Key lessons and strategies include:

• Identifying project purpose and scope, populations addressed, their current health assessments, the needs of individuals, communities, institutions and nations, and the competencies of implementing organizations.
• Examining institutional rules and policies including social, political, economic and legal ownership choices as well as structures, competencies, and processes, including, examining technology governance for policies on ICT use and ICT objectives.
• Examining failures due to lack of correct needs assessment, lack of vision and strategy, lack of information about ICT applications, computer illiteracy, insufficient budgetary resources, weak ICT infrastructures, absence of legislative and constitutional frameworks, and limits in medical informatics.

Further strategies express the need for local content generation from people who both use and provide health care. ICTs can be used to tell their stories, communicate lessons from their experiences, create content from these experiences relevant to local contexts and issues for their community use and for further health action in support of each other.

The document provides a framework for stepped changes towards for staged development, taking local and national context in developing countries into account.

The paper offers seven broad conclusions:

1. Keep the technology simple, relevant, and local.
2. Build on what is there (and being used).
3. Involve users in the design.
4. Strengthen the capacity to use, work with, and develop ICT.
5. Introduce greater monitoring and evaluation, particularly participatory approaches.
6. Continue to research and share learning about what works and what fails.