Project: Harmonized Digital Health Transformation: A Pilot Initiative in Luanda's Healthcare System
State of development: Current
Stage of development: Early stage
Type of instrument — Impact Bond: No; Outcomes Fund: Yes; Social Impact Incentives (SIINC): No; Social Impact Guarantee: No; Payment-by-results (no pre-financing): No; Technical Assistance and Market-building program: Yes; Other: 
Rationale for using outcome-based finance: 1. Program Innovations: The DHP presents an innovative approach to digitized healthcare. Harmonizing healthcare services, it emphasizes quality-of-care standards. Adapted to various hospital workflows, the DHP facilitates clinical data management, from tracking patient history to overseeing preventive care.
2. Potential Pathways to Scale: The DHP's success in Africa underlines its scalability. Its design, inclusive of manuals and SOPs, ensures any stakeholder can effectively adopt it. From a pilot in Luanda, the DHP holds vast potential for broad deployment across Angola's hospital sector.
3. Financial Sustainability: At a cost of 300,000 USD, DHP's emphasis on open-source solutions and community-driven support ensures long-term financial viability. If successful, this platform will attract additional funding.
Key challenges to launch: 1. Budgetary Limitations: The early phase requires financial commitment for research, testing, and early roll-out.
2. Stakeholder Apprehension: Convincing providers, who might be skeptical about adopting novel technologies, is essential.
3. Consistency and Capacity Building: Instituting uniform quality measures and preparing medical staff for the platform is challenging without detailed directives.
The proposed $300,000 will mitigate these issues by:
1. Supporting Design Research: This allocation facilitates research and customization of the DHP to cater to Luanda's distinct requirements while being economically viable.
2. Technical Advancements: The budget will aid in acquiring the needed technology, amalgamating open-source systems, and ensuring compatibility with limited bandwidth environments.
3. Change Management: Allocated funds will be used to organize workshops and sessions, encouraging service providers' to adopt DHP facilitating seamless integration.
4. Initiating the CoP: Some resources will go towards launching the Community of Practice, guaranteeing sustained assistance, consistency, and perpetual refinements.
Social/developmental challenge: Despite investment by government and others in the hospital sector, there are high implementation costs, inconsistency in quality standards, a lack of coordination by health professionals and resistance from service providers. The proposed Digital Health Platform (DHP) directly addresses these inefficiencies. The adoption of open-source software will mitigate high expenses by introducing a system that can be scaled and customized according to the realities of the hospitals. By prioritizing low bandwidth usage, the project caters to areas with poor internet infrastructure. The establishment of a Community of Practice offers sustained support, promoting collaboration and ensuring continual improvements. The DHP's modular nature promotes customization, shifting from a disease-specific paradigm to a holistic, person-centered approach, enhancing the user experience and its integration with primary health care units will allow for greater coordination and referral management. Through documentation and the development of manuals, the market will be able to replicate this in Angola.
Expected intervention model: WHO and the Ministry of Health aim to implement a Digital Health Platform (DHP) aimed at harmonizing digitization in healthcare services, emphasizing a quality-of-care approach to hospital services and establishing national standard guidelines on the digitization of quality of care. The project is designed to be piloted in a small hospital in Luanda, Angola and will be documented academically by the Private University of Angola.
The DHP is a facility-wide end-to-end digital solution that enables users to collect, analyze and interpret clinical information. The platform can be manipulated to fit the hospital across different service delivery levels. The platform has several modules that enable users to easily enter, retrieve and analyze data.
The project also includes the development of manuals and guidelines allowing any stakeholder to effectively replicate the DHP thus improving its scalability and its importance. A similar platform has been developed by WHOâs regional office and this project would be guided by its implementation.
It is an opportunity to modernize healthcare in Angola, with a view to seeking additional funding to scale the project if successful. The collaboration and focus on open-source solutions and community-driven support make it a viable and promising initiative for the Angolan healthcare system.
Policy sectors — Employment and private sector development: No; Education: No; Social protection: No; Criminal justice: No; Health: Yes; Agriculture: No; Environment and climate change: No; Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: No; Energy: No; Humanitarian: No; Early Childhood Education: No; Other: 
Primary SDG goal: 3, 8, 9
Notes: Data for this pipeline project was last updated in August 2023
Delivery location: Angola