Towards a Digital Health Curriculum for Health Workforce for the African Region

Abstract

Background Digital technologies are fast gaining space in health. A skilled workforce is required to use existing and emerging technologies that support healthcare. However, existing medical informatics curriculum from the USA, UK, and African region reveal gaps in required competencies for a digital health worker, especially for the African region. Only a few health workers possess digital competencies required to optimally use existing technologies. Therefore, the aim of this study was to identify the need for and propose a structure of the digital health curriculum for the African region.Methods The study retrieved 42 peer-reviewed articles and reports published in English between 2005 and 2019 from PubMed Central, Google Scholar, and Biomedical Central. Only articles that addressed any form of pre-service and or in-service training of digital health workers were included in the review. In addition, 13 medical informatics curricula from the USA, UK, and African region were reviewed to determine the structure of the Digital Health curriculum suitable for the African region.Results Many countries in the African region have developed ehealth strategies that clearly highlight the need to train DH workforce. Results showed knowledge gaps of a communicator, a collaborator, a professional technologist, an advocate, and a manager required of digital health worker in the African region. However, existing digital/health informatics programmes in the region lack balanced course programmes to develop these core competencies. Besides, corresponding online training is modeled after traditional face-to-face training, thus limiting the opportunity for in-service health workers. Validation of the Lesotho curriculum confirmed only 10 modules as suitable to develop a rounded digital health worker (particularly for health leaders) for the African region.Conclusions Since it is important to develop competencies consistent with the local health systems to realize the full benefits of ehealth technologies, the African region needs to bridge their human resource gaps. Thus, African countries need to first develop or adopt a digital health worker competency framework and then re-organize their national health training curriculum to ensure a standardized / universal curriculum for training the digital health workforce. Future works will assess the DH worker competencies and expected outcomes for the African region.