Strengthening Digital Public Infrastructure for Health

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) for health has significant economic, cross-sectoral, and population health benefits. For DPI for health, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends digital enterprise architecture across a nation’s health sector and provides a categorisation of digital health interventions (DHIs). Given that G20 countries invest significantly in the health of their own populations and contribute the majority of WHO’s funding, they can take the lead by demonstrating the value of DPI for health investments in their own countries and by encouraging WHO to further strengthen its definitions of DPI for health. In partnership with G20 countries and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), WHO should further develop DPI by providing guidance on vendor-agnostic requirements and DHIs, and set standards for a nation’s cloud-based enterprise architecture (EA) and DHI. This guidance should include vendor-agnostic workflows, minimum datasets, relevant metadata, standards for privacy, security, and interoperability, and other requirements.