A Practical Approach to Digital Transformation: A Guide to Health Institutions in Developing Countries

Most healthcare organizations, at the local, national, and international levels aspire to commence their digital transformation but are at a loss on how to start the process. This chapter presents a practical approach that begins with laying down the foundations for strong governance to guide institutions towards this complex process. The approach begins with Governance (G)—setting clear decision-making structures and strategic directives to the whole enterprise. This is followed by adoption of Frameworks (F) that provide a common reference for all stakeholders as they undergo their respective changes. Because almost all healthcare data are sensitive and should be kept confidential, Ethical (E) processes must be in place to ensure that patients are safe and that their welfare is of the utmost priority. Data governance (D) then comes into play providing clear guidelines, systems, and structures in the management of data. Once these aforementioned fundamentals are in place, cloud and compliance (C) capabilities should be available to ensure that a secure infrastructure is in place to store, process, and protect large volumes of information. This elastic infrastructure enables the accumulation of big data (B) at a rate faster than what most analytical tools can manage in real-time opening up opportunities for visualizing information. With this tremendous amounts of data, the prerequisits are laid out for Artificial Intelligence (A) and new insights, previously unknown, can be discovered and used for creating new products and services for the enterprise and as input for decision-making for improved governance.