Best Practices and Lessons Learned in eHealth in Four Low and Lower Middle-Income Countries in Africa

Studying best practices and lessons learned is important to improve performance and avoid previous mistakes of projects and interventions. In this paper, the analysis of ehealth interventions in four African Low and Lower Middle-Income Countries, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi and Tunisia is performed to extract best practices and lessons learned. A two-level evaluation methodology is proposed, where the first level is based on data available on the Global Digital Health Index platform, and the second level is a qualitative analysis based on a set of criteria. The findings obtained reveal 7 best practices and associated lessons learned in the studied countries. Although the extracted best practices represent successful interventions, the analysis indicates that certain aspects represent challenges to their success, namely, sustainability, transferability, innovation and impact.

[1]  F. Nijboer,et al.  Best Practices and Lessons Learned for Action Research in eHealth Design and Implementation: Literature Review , 2022, Journal of medical Internet research.

[2]  Henrik Eriksson,et al.  Planning a holistic summative eHealth evaluation in an interdisciplinary and multi-national setting: a case study and propositions for guideline development , 2021, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

[3]  L. Bertolini,et al.  How policies become best practices: a case study of best practice making in an EU knowledge sharing project , 2020 .

[4]  H. Wijeysundera,et al.  Identifying optimal frameworks to implement or evaluate digital health interventions: a scoping review protocol , 2020, BMJ Open.

[5]  Lena Otto,et al.  A design and evaluation framework for digital health interventions , 2019, it Inf. Technol..

[6]  Rowena Luk,et al.  Best practices in scaling digital health in low and middle income countries , 2018, Globalization and Health.

[7]  M. Johansen,et al.  Factors Determining the Success and Failure of eHealth Interventions: Systematic Review of the Literature , 2018, Journal of medical Internet research.

[8]  McKayla Ketchum Taking it to the Next Level , 2017, John Heinrichs Scholarly & Creative Activities Day.

[9]  R. Lau,et al.  Factors that influence the implementation of e-health: a systematic review of systematic reviews (an update) , 2016, Implementation Science.

[10]  Shariq Khoja,et al.  Conceptual framework for development of comprehensive e-health evaluation tool. , 2013, Telemedicine journal and e-health : the official journal of the American Telemedicine Association.

[11]  W. Otten,et al.  E-health applications and services for patient empowerment: directions for best practices in The Netherlands. , 2010, Telemedicine journal and e-health : the official journal of the American Telemedicine Association.

[12]  P. Gill,et al.  Methods of data collection in qualitative research: interviews and focus groups , 2008, BDJ.

[13]  Digital Health Ecosystem for African countries , 2018 .