Digital Health RMNCH Toolkit

"Digital health is versatile and can be used to help assess and prime the market [for commodities]; it is also a feasible way to reach traditionally underserved populations (e.g., hard to reach, marginalized)."

The Digital Health Reproductive, Maternal and Newborn Health (RMNCH) Toolkit, compiled by HealthEnabled, provides an introduction on how digital health can be used to support the United Nations Commission on Life-Saving Commodities for Women's and Children's Health ("the Commission"). The Commission was established in 2012 as a part of the Every Woman, Every Child (EWEC) movement with the purpose of increasing access to 13 overlooked life-saving commodities. Ten recommendations and actions were identified that help expand demand for, access to, and use of the commodities in hard-to-reach areas. This toolkit has been designed around the Commission's 10 recommendations, highlighting ways in which digital health is used to address each one of them. The toolkit, which includes links to digital health tools and literature, may be most useful to individuals unfamiliar with digital health and who are seeking to learn and take note of lessons from commodity-driven implementations around the world.

The toolkit begins with a general section about digital health: "Recognizing the opportunity that digital technologies have, given increasing global mobile phone penetration rates, more affordable technologies, improved communications infrastructure and the relatively low cost but extensive reach of SMS [text messaging], data and voice, the Commission will employ digital health for demand generation and other activities." A table on page 5 highlights which digital health applications are relevant for each recommendation. For example, recommendation 1 relates to shaping global markets. The reader learns that "[d]igital technologies, ranging from computers to mobile phones, can be used to support procurement through enhancing supply chain management; understand health system needs via access to digital registries and vital events and timely data collection and reporting; generate and maintain demand through BCC [behaviour change communication]; mediate payment and incentives through 'real-time' financial transactions and incentives and ensure the proper use of medicine and validate their quality through bidirectional communication. The appropriate linkages, channels and infrastructure must be in place not only in individual countries, but also across countries. These linkages can be amplified through digital tools for provider work-planning and scheduling, provider training and education/blended learning and human resource management."

A separate resources section contains links to tools, projects, reports, and literature on each digital health application. These reports and literature, such as those on BCC, are meant to provide "real world" examples that highlight how digital health has been used (successfully) in the context of the recommendations.