Digital Health Inventory (DHI) – DATIM

Background of the Digital Health Inventory (DHI)

Understanding how PEPFAR and other cooperating agencies are investing in digital health is critical to maximizing the impact and benefits of such tools and allows partners to leverage learnings and best practices across implementations. As part of COP22 guidance, all PEPFAR Operating Units (OUs) were tasked with developing data use work plans indicating their commitment to relevant data use activities.

The objective of requiring country teams to catalog their digital health portfolio is to document the scope, scale, characteristics, and level of investment of PEPFAR-supported (in-part or in-whole) digital health activities across a range of mission-critical system categories. This will help track and refine PEPFAR's contributions to the broader national health data ecosystem, identify investment overlaps, and discover opportunities for new investments or scale-up. By utilizing the DHI data, it is possible to get a clear picture of PEPFAR's digital health investments and how they are being utilized, thus enabling better decision-making and health outcomes.

During the iterative development of the DHI tool, we aligned with the Principles of Digital Investments and Donor Alignment for Digital Health. These principles guide us to design, implement, and scale digital health investments that are user-centered, interoperable, sustainable, and secure; while ensuring that our investments are in line with national health strategies and plans, build sustainable local capacity, leverage existing systems, and align with global health priorities. By aligning our investments with these principles, we can maximize the impact of our interventions and contribute to the global health agenda.

What is being inventoried?

Digital health investments are the PEPFAR-funded electronic tools, systems, devices, and resources used to support health system needs. One way of categorizing these is by the System Category of your digital health investment, which represents the types of information communication and technology (ICT) applications and information systems designed and implemented to support one or more PEPFAR-funded digital health interventions. The System Categories and accompanying definitions are adapted from the World Health Organization’s Classification of digital interventions, services and applications in health (WHO CDISAH). A full list of illustrative examples of digital health interventions and service and application types can be accessed at the WHO CDISAH website.

System Categories

The PEPFAR Digital Health Inventory (DHI) captures data on digital health investments across PEPFAR Operating Units. Digital health investments make up Discrete Systems. Discrete Systems are assigned to System Categories. System Categories are classes of information systems based on those found in the  Digital Health Atlas (DHA). The number of key System Categories within the DHI was reduced to those that were most common among PEPFAR-supported systems: Community-Based Health Information Systems (CBHIS), Electronic Medical Records/Patient Medical System (EMR/PMS), Logistics Management Information System (LMIS), Lab Information Systems (LIS), Pharmacy Information Systems (PIS), National Integrated Longitudinal Person-level Data Repository (NDR), and Health Management Information system/Aggregate Reporting Systems (HMIS). However, the full list of outstanding system categories can be found in the drop-down menu when selecting ‘Other’ in the DHI. Note that there can be more than one System Category and more than one digital health investment per Discrete System.

Ways DHI data can be useful?

Some reasons for tracking digital health investments are:

Developing guidance resources to inform planning
Ensuring there is donor alignment of investments
Conducting national inventories and landscape analyses
Identifying scalable tools that help improve healthcare delivery
Improving the efficiency of programming and reducing redundancy of digital interventions (some due to lack of awareness of implemented solutions)
Articulating required digital functionality based on identified needs

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Training Materials and Job Aids

General User Reference Materials

Implementing Partner User Reference Materials

PEPFAR Coordination Office/Interagency/Agency User Reference Materials

Orientation Materials

Helpful Resources