Foundations of Digital Health: Navigating the evolving landscape of digital solutions for health systems strengthening

Digital Health has a major role in strengthening health systems around the world, including in low-,middle- and high-income countries. Governments, NGOs, and donors are increasingly turning to digital health tools, such as clinical decision support systems, electronic records, and patient monitoring systems, to improve access and quality of health information, enhance healthcare processes, achieve better quality of care, and improve patient outcomes. Despite their potential, these types of digital health solutions often come with challenges ranging from clinical to technological, social, legal, and regulatory. The quality and strength of evidence about their effectiveness varies and evidence on their impact and sustainability is often limited.

To help ensure investments in digital health for strengthening health systems are efficient, it is crucial that stakeholders have a comprehensive understanding of not only the range of digital health options, but, perhaps more importantly, the evidence of effectiveness, planning processes, data protection and information security, interoperability, governance, and sustainability of digital health tools they may be considering to adopt and implement.

In this interactive course, we will focus on developing a robust understanding of the implications, constraints, and opportunities in the application of digital health solutions in health systems. Participants will become familiar with fundamental concepts in digital health and develop the ability to better navigate the evolving landscape of digitalization in healthcare. Participants will be provided with terminology and classifications of digital solutions. Then, key considerations for successful and sustainable digital health solutions, including understanding the evidence of effectiveness, successful planning processes, data protection and information security, interoperability, governance, and sustainability of digital health tools will be discussed and illustrated through case studies and evidence reviews. The course will focus on specific examples of digital health tools for health systems strengthening, including clinical decision support systems, remote monitoring and self-management tools, and tools to support the use of data for decision-making.

By the end of the course participants will:

• Be able to describe key concepts, terminology, and classifications in digital health;
• Understand implications, constraints, and opportunities in the application of digital health in health systems, and know how to plan for and/or overcome them;
• Understand the quality and strength of evidence on specific digital health tools, such as clinical decision support systems, and remote monitoring and self-management solutions;
• Be able to critically assess digital health solutions;
• Have essential knowledge to inform decision-making about digital health planning and implementation in health systems.

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• Basic knowledge and experience in a medical or public health field;
• Interest in digital health.

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• Lectures/presentations on digital health topics;
• Case studies;
• Group work.

To get the Certificate of completion and the 1 ECTS participants MUST:

• Attend at least 80% of the course;
• Attend the plenary offered during the first day of the course;
• Actively participate in group work.

Facilitators and participants of this course will be online. In case participants are already in Lugano to attend another course, they can follow the course from a dedicated classroom/hub in Lugano.

For course pricing information, see here. Discounts are available for participants from LMICs, PhD and Master Students, and Students and Employees from the LSS Partner Universities (SSPH+, USI, SUPSI, and SWISS TPH).  

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