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Digital health and the need to develop centers of expertise in sub-Saharan Africa : two examples in Mali and Cameroon Volume 27, issue 4, Octobre-Novembre-Décembre 2017

Tables

Authors
1 Département d’étude et de recherche en santé publique et spécialités, Faculté de médecine de Bamako, Mali
2 Centre d’expertise et de recherche en télémédecine et e-santé (CERTES), Mali
3 Réseau en Afrique francophone pour la télémédecine (RAFT)
4 Faculté de médecine, Université de Yaoundé I, Cameroun
5 Association Medical Informatics and Global Health Institute (MIGH), Cameroun
6 Département de radiologie et d’informatique médicale, Université de Genève, Suisse
* Correspondance

It is generally agreed today that digital technology provides a lever for improving access to health care, care processes, and public health
planning and activities such as education and prevention. Its use in countries that have reached a given level of development has taken place in a
somewhat fragmented manner that raises important interoperability problems and sometimes makes synergy impossible between the different projects of digital health. This may be linked to several factors, principally the lack of a global vision of digital health, and inadequate methodological
knowledge that prevents the development and implementation of this vision. The countries of Africa should be able to profit from these errors It is generally agreed today that digital technology provides a lever for improving access to health care, care processes, and public health planning and activities such as education and prevention. Its use in countries that have reached a given level of development has taken place in a somewhat fragmented manner that raises important interoperability problems and sometimes makes synergy impossible between the different projects of digital health. This may be linked to several factors, principally the lack of a global vision of digital health, and inadequate methodological
knowledge that prevents the development and implementation of this vision. The countries of Africa should be able to profit from these errorsIt is generally agreed today that digital technology provides a lever for improving access to health care, care processes, and public health planning and activities such as education and prevention. Its use in countries that have reached a given level of development has taken place in a somewhat fragmented manner that raises important interoperability problems and sometimes makes synergy impossible between the different projects of digital health. This may be linked to several factors, principally the lack of a global vision of digital health, and inadequate methodological
knowledge that prevents the development and implementation of this vision. The countries of Africa should be able to profit from these errors from the beginnings of digital health, by moving toward systemic approaches, known standards, and tools appropriate to the realities on the ground.

The aim of this work is to present the methodological approaches as well as the principal results of two relatively new centers of expertise in Mali and Cameroon intended to cultivate this vision of digital governance in the domain of health and to train professionals to implement the projects.

Both centers were created due to initiatives of organizations of civil society. The center in Mali developed toward an economic interest group and
then to collaboration with healthcare and university organizations. The same process is underway at the Cameroon center.

The principal results from these centers can be enumerated under different aspects linked to research, development, training, and implementation
of digital health tools. They have produced dozens of scientific publications, doctoral dissertations, theses, and papers focused especially on subjects such as the medicoeconomic evaluation tools of e-health and health information technology systems.

In light of these results, we can conclude that these two centers of expertise have well and truly been established. Their role may be decisive in the local training of participants, the culture of good governance of digital health projects, the development of operational strategies, and the implementation of projects.