Around the world, countless lives are lost due to insufficient access to quality health information. The availability of accurate, timely, and analyzed data is directly relevant to the quality of an individual’s health and the healthcare system in general, the delivery of individual care, and the understanding and management of overall health systems.
This discussion paper:
1) Examines the role ICTs, and mobile technology in particular, can play in improving access to quality health information, review the ecosystem of health information related to patients,
2) Traces the data throughout the continuum of care, examine health information flows from patients in villages to international health organizations and the most important steps in between,
3) Identifies common ground on which technologists and public health professionals can develop innovative strategies and tools to strengthen health care systems by supporting health data flows, working from the premise that better data collection will lead to better health policies and health outcomes,
4) Focuses on three healthcare domains – surveillance systems, supply chain, and human resources – and through the perspectives of experts in these domains, identify critical gaps in health information flows that technology-based solutions could address. In the case of each of these three domains, we use maternal health as an example to show how technology-backed interventions can improve health information flows,
5) Identifies barriers, choke points, and other inefficiencies to guide the discussion of how modern ICTs can improve health information flows and health outcomes in the developing world,
6) Provides recommendations for using modern ICTs to make health information flow more efficiently and perhaps even transform the process of care delivery itself.
