Let us pursue the first digital health investment strategy

The billionaire co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation visited the country - where he has traveled with his wife and co-chair Melinda many times - in part to check out the BID Initiative. Led by the global health organisation PATH and funded by the Gates Foundation, the programme aims to bring data to decision-making for better health outcomes. Now, with $15 million from the Gates Foundation, Tanzania will pursue the first digital health investment strategy of its kind in the region.

It is a common problem across countries that because routine health data is generally low quality, health decisions are based on best guesses rather than reliable information. The insufficient use of data to inform planning decisions, manage programmes and deliver services can lead to life-threatening consequences, such as stock outs of medicines, delayed responses to outbreaks, or wasteful health care spending.

While many countries have tackled pieces of this problem, efforts to build strong routine data ecosystems have focused on districts or verticals rather than scaling to the national level.

In lower-middle income countries such as Tanzania, there is a need to address the dearth of quality data, as well as supporting areas such as digital and data literacy and legal and policy frameworks. But according to Settle, the way donors and partners have addressed these problems in the past has only made these problems worse. Funding different health verticals has led to disconnected, fragmented and duplicative systems, approaches and strategies, he said.

PATH’s strategy has been to support stakeholders, including the Tanzanian government, to align and coordinate their digital health investments and reduce this kind of fragmentation. The Gates Foundation’s $15 million investment will allow the country to implement the Digital Health Investment Road Map and 17 priority investments, ranging from digitising hospital data to implementing a health data.

Let us be ready to embrace technology. The government, PATH and the foundation are on a learning journey. Together we are discovering new things, like how to introduce technology in a way that it becomes a tool to make better decisions, rather than a burden.

This effort builds on work that PATH has done on information technology and data use in health programmes, such as the Malaria Control and Elimination Partnership in Africa. We are told that the real secret to PATH’s success in this instance is the partnership it has developed with the government of Tanzania.

A couple of weeks ago, the government announced a new plan to start using Zipline drones for delivery of blood, vaccines and other medical supplies to health facilities across the country from early next year, offering another example of how data and technology are being increasingly used to provide handy health solutions.

In health, we invest heavily in the creation of population-level data on disease dynamics; on efficacy of specific interventions; on data about specific populations to inform drug, vaccine and intervention development; on the cost and cost-effectiveness of health interventions; on what people actually want, in terms of health care. All with the goal of informing health decisions among decision-makers, whether they are global funders, regional bodies, country governments, or a mother in a village.