Resource and Investment
Digital health transformation cannot happen without adequate funding. Unfortunately, funding for digital health solutions does not always consider all the costs involved in developing, managing, adopting, and scaling solutions within existing health systems. Most governments and donors structure their budgets around specific health system interventions or projects, and often neglect the necessary investments in institutional capacity and the enabling environment that will create the conditions necessary for successful adoption. This creates a piecemeal approach that makes it very difficult to identify and track the amount of funding inverted or needed to digitalise health systems across different contexts.
Governments allocate more funding for digital health and ensure this is supporting the implementation of costed digital health strategies. Funding needs to be allocated to addressing the enabling environment, including for the development and enactment of legislation and regulation, and for the effective management and coordination of the sector to deliver on the strategy. This can only happen when there is a dedicated budget to digital health. Donors also need to ensure dedicated funding for digital health that can be tracked and reported on.