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Digital Square is a digital health marketplace (or 'square') where supply and demand come together to accelerate health equity. We connect health leaders with the resources necessary for digital transformation. Digital Square is housed at PATH, and supported by USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a consortium of other donors.

This wiki serves as a platform for technical audiences to obtain resources and information related to Digital Square's investments in global goods. More general information about Digital Square can be found on the main website.

COVID-19 Response

Digital Square is leveraging its unique role and strengths to support countries, donors, and partners in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Harnessing existing relationships across the global digital health ecosystem, we mobilize our robust network of partners in coordinated response. We also utilize PATH's work in global health security, malaria, primary health care, and the broader digital and data portfolio to more comprehensively support country partners in ensuring essential health services remain available.

Read our full capability statement here. Global Good Adaptations for COVID-19

Global Good Adaptations to COVID-19 (updated February 5, 2021)

Global Good Adaptation Resources
Digital Health Atlas
As part of the global COVID19 response, the WHO has enhanced the Digital Health Atlas to provide support for governments and investors focused on scaling effective digital health implementations. Key features:
  • 1. Enhanced MOH pages, able to store reference documents of national relevance (policies, investment plans, maturity assessments, etc)
  • 2. Documentation of Project Phases providing DHA users with insights regarding the progress of a project along the software development life cycle (from ideation to scaled implementation)
  • 3. Facilitating the labeling and description of multi-country deployments as "Global Initiatives".
  • 4. Facilitating the labeling of a project as research-focused and time-bound, allowing researchers to share time-critical insights and progress into Covid-19 and digital health directly with Ministries of Health and Investors
OpenHIE COVID-19 Task Force (Cross-cutting for all global goods)
  • Identify and collate information relating to data standards and exchange relevant to the COVID-19 response.
  • Identify gaps in and establish standards for data exchange priorities.
  • Provide documentation and guidance (to both the global good community as well as proprietary software tools) to improve adherence to these standards.
  • Ensure that rapidly deployed solutions can be integrated into the national digital health architectures.
  • Outputs: HL7 FHIR profile / implementation guide for case reporting & contact tracing.
Bahmni

In Nepal, Bahmni has been adapted for COVID-19 response in a few government hospitals:

  • Creation of a COVID-19 screening template
  • Data is synced in near-real time to dashboards.
CommCare
  • Creation of a template application which provides a full implementation of the WHO FFX Contact Tracing protocol which is available for immediate adoption and customization through the platform. Currently working on ensuring that there is a wide array of translations available for the text.
  • Working on additional template applications for further response and recovery workflows that will become available as they are validated.
  • The team is trying to secure free messaging for COVID-19 response to support self-reporting workflows for positive cases once cases overcome the tracing capacity of health systems.
  • CommCare will be releasing a WhatsApp integration in the near future.
Community Health Toolkit (CHT)
  • Developing CHT reference applications as starter apps for implementers to contextualize, and readily deploy and scale for their needs. These are as follows:
    • Surveillance and Detection: Port of Entry Screening, Event-Based Surveillance, Contact Tracing, and Community-Based Symptom Screening Apps and systems
    • Patient Care: Rapid Diagnostic Testing App, Referral systems, and Isolation Messaging systems, and
    • Protecting Community Health Workers: PPE Projections and Daily Health Checks
  • Accompaniment through secondment of technical staff, supporting our colleagues in Ministries of Health.
  • Continue expanding the use cases and workflows supported by the CHT for COVID-19 response efforts.
  • Coordination with the wider digital health community between existing digital health tools, systems, and standards.

The CHT Team has created two use case demonstrations: Port of Entry (PoE Screening and CHT Rapid Diagnostic Teat (RDT) workflow for community health workers.

DHIS2
  • DHIS2 has several ready-to-install digital data packages to support COVID-19 surveillance & response based on WHO guidelines. All packages are optimized for Android or web-based data collection. The COVID-19 digital data package includes standard metadata aligned with the WHO’s technical guidance on COVID-19 surveillance and case definitions and implementation guidance to enable rapid deployment in countries. Ready-to-install DHIS2 digital data packages to support COVID-19 surveillance & response based on WHO guidelines. All packages are optimized for Android or web-based data collection. The packages support:
    • 1) Case-based Surveillance: DHIS2 has released a digital data package to accelerate case detection, situation reporting, active surveillance and response for COVID-19. The package is inspired by the Ministry of Health Sri Lanka’s pioneering design of DHIS2 tracker for COVID-19 case detection and draws on years of collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop information system standards for case-based disease surveillance.;
    • 2) Contact tracing program to facilitate operations of contact tracing and with built in relationships to the case-based tracker for enhanced analysis;
    • 3) Ports of entry screening and follow up
    • 4) Automated analysis of core indicators & dashboards for response planning. The package also includes options for aggregate and event-based surveillance; countries can transition between data models according to realities on the ground while still capturing most critical data points.
  • Team has created training materials and videos for the above configurations
  • Packages translations are now available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian and Norwegian. Additional languages can be added on demand.
  • Existing immunization registries can rapidly be adapted for COVID vaccine deployment. Information on the immunization registries can be found here The newly released DHIS2 Vaccine Delivery Toolkit can be found here.
Logistimo
  • Logistimo SCM has been adapted to include data capture for the COVID-19 supply chain (about 70 products and equipment), which has been deployed across a few states in India.
  • Additional data capture available for supplies to laboratories for tests.
  • Logistimo has created specific COVID-19 dashboards (that we call bulletin boards) which help in easy surveillance for control towers.
  • Several partners have been assessing how effectively COVID-19 bio-medical waste is being handled and disposed using Logistimo Snapshot.
GOFR
  • Overview of GOFR tool for facility reconciliation
mHero
  • Deployed in Liberia in support of the COVID-19 response.
  • New mHero architecture has been developed.
  • Adding additional features including:
    • COVID-19 disease surveillance workflows
    • Ability to send messages from any FHIR compliant database such as OpenMRS
    • Ability to update any FHIR compliant database with new respondent information
    • Ability to respond to messages via WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger
Mobile WACh
  • Provide up-to-date guidance by SMS (push messaging) on symptoms, social distancing, and care-seeking to the general population, as well as HCWs in need of guidance.
  • Provide interactive triage of patient symptoms by 2-way SMS with a HCW, based on international guidance to determine whether and how patients should seek care, and avoid unnecessary risk and strain on the medical system.
  • Continue supporting pregnant and postpartum women, neonates and people living with HIV or other chronic conditions with SMS curricula we have already developed at a time when they will experience even more pronounced shortages of in-person medical care.
ODK
  • ODK's lead developer, Nafundi, is offering pro-bono help to anyone working on the COVID-19 response.
  • Rapidly digitizing forms from the WHO and CDC protocols and making them available for others to use and build on.
  • Offering support for ODK for contact tracing, decision support, community education, strategic mapping, and case management.
  • Demo available on how the WHO minimum reporting form running in ODK Collect (Android) and Enketo (Web) send data to an ODK Central server, which then flows data to a live updating dashboard in PowerBI and a spreadsheet in Excel.
OpenConcept Lab
  • Published a value set, "COVID-19 Starter Set," based on the Columbia International eHealth Laboratory (CIEL) interface terminology
  • Rushed multiple large terminology curation and import processes to support publication of this value set.
OpenELIS
  • OpenELIS Global has added COVID-19 metadata for laboratory testing and resulting, including LOINC codes for interoperability via HL7 2.5. Metadata will be included in the default test catalog with the next release of OpenELIS.
  • Users can immediately use the Administration Menu: Test Management function in the software to add tests for the corona virus (SARS-CoV-2) to their laboratory test catalog to facilitate tracking of laboratory tests and results.
OpenHIM
  • Coming soon - generic support for COVID-19 data exchange with the OpenHIM by extending the OpenHIM Mapping Mediator offerings, supporting a range of use cases around case reporting, surveillance and contact tracing that require an exchange of data between information systems.
  • OpenHIM will support standardized data schema that supports the WHO standards, and in turn FHIR.
openIMIS
  • openIMIS was customized to act as a management information system to manage a government to people cash transfer scheme as a part of the COVID-19 response of the Government of The Gambia. openIMIS has been used to enrol beneficiary households into the system and keep track of the payments being made to these households. The scheme currently covers 80,000 households in The Gambia, but is slated for a nationwide scaleup soon, and it is anticipated that the openIMIS based tool will be continued to be used for the management.
OpenLMIS
  • OpenLMIS is responding by supporting OpenLMIS countries to optimize their use of the software to encourage good supply chain management of COVID supplies. A separate, simplified OpenLMIS instance has been launched called OpenLMIS COVID-19 Edition, which is a lighter weight and quicker start up tool to help countries get started right away to manage COVID-related commodities (based on the WHO product list). In addition, the OpenLMIS team continues to conduct outreach to existing users to ensure they know how to quickly:
    • Add new Products
    • Initiate emergency requisitions
    • Configure and manage inventory of Kits (anticipating the need for COVID kits)
  • The OpenLMIS core team will prioritize any configuration or work related to these functions. Future product committee meetings could be used to share lessons across countries to see how they are preparing their supply chains for COVID.
OpenMRS
  • The OpenMRS community's goal is to support extension of current functionality that will make it easier for 5,500 existing implementations to a) screen, test, and manage patients and b) report data out efficiently to DHIS2 for public health surveillance.
  • Active COVID-19 Response Squad is working to identify existing work within the OpenMRS community that can be rapidly adapted by implementers and packaged as a suite of COVID-19 Public Health Response Tools. Informatics experts, business analysts, UI/UX designers, developers, and implementers are encouraged to join the conversation, weekly meetings, design forums, and work with the COVID-19 Response Squad.
  • The following OpenMRS COVID-19 Public Health Response Tools under development and discussion include:
    • CIEL concept dictionary with COVID-19 concepts
    • COVID-19 Public Health Response Module
    • COVID-19 Public Health Reporting System Interfaces
  • Standard content related to COVID-19 included in the recent release of Reference Application 2.10.0.
OpenSRP/Akuko/Canopy
  • Develop use of Ona Data/RapidPro + Canopy for secondary response.
  • Create OpenSRP/Reveal and an RDT reader for contact tracing and Akuko data storytelling platform for data viz platform for information sharing.
  • Working with clients in Malawi government to adapt the ODP module for COVID-19 in the future
Reveal
  • Modified forms to incorporate COVID-related data
  • Modifications completed for the planning module to support Reveal's ability to get resources to vulnerable populations (food aid, economic aid, sanitation resources as well as routine health resources), which is crucial given the quarantine and lock-down restrictions many countries are facing.
  • Support to attain high vaccination coverage achieving last mile delivery
SORMAS
  • Ensuring availability of validated real time surveillance data which would in turn lower the disease burden through enabled contact tracing while monitoring the potential for future cases.
  • Offering easy-to-use, multifunctional mobile health (mHealth) and electronic health (eHealth) applications, which provide real-time data availability and compatibility with standard surveillance systems.

COVID-19 Community Coordination

Digital Square is pleased to share resources sourced from the Digital Health Community to facilitate alignment and coordination in the COVID-19 response, and to support countries choosing digital tools to aid in their own response efforts. If you have a resource you would like us to host on the wiki, please contact Amanda BenDor.

UNICEF Country Mapping for COVID-19 Response

UNICEF has initiated a country mapping of relevant Digital Health solutions that can be leveraged to support frontline health workers in their response to COVID-19 and that can be used by countries to support Risk Communication and Community Engagement on COVID-19. The mapping can be accessed here. If you want to update the country mapping, please use the comment function and the UNICEF team will update the information accordingly.

Likewise, a partnership landscaping has also been done to map where implementing partners are working to support digital tools for frontline health workers and which digital solutions they are supporting. This mapping can be accessed here. If your organization is missing from the partnership landscaping, you can add the information directly in the spread sheet.

Both these mapping tools are free to use by anyone who wish to know which solutions already exist at country level and that can be deployed for frontline health workers for COVID-19 response and recovery efforts.

Comparison of Digital Tools used in the COVID-19 Response

Countries have access to a large, complex ecosystem of digital platforms that can support COVID-19 response. The process of selecting the most appropriate platform for a country's specific needs or context can be overwhelming without clear information about the benefits and limitations of the options. Several new resources have been developed to support in-country assessment and decisions about digital technologies for COVID response.

Johns Hopkins assessment

In July 2020, Johns Hopkins published an assessment of digital platforms that have an established presence in several low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), and either have been or could be rapidly reconfigured to address COVID-19 related case management and contact tracing needs. The assessment includes a review of the following tools: CommCare, Community Health Toolkit (CHT), DHIS2 Tracker, Go.Data, ODK, OpenSRP, RapidPro, SORMAS, and WelTel. The platforms were selected based on their existing deployment, flexibility, and adaptability for COVID-19 use cases, their ability to support multiple languages, and stakeholder interest in how these applications can be leveraged in response to COVID-19. The full report can be accessed here.

Digital Square efforts

In recognition that this is a rapidly evolving landscape, Digital Square has been working across donors to collate a comparison of digital tools that are currently used in the COVID-19 response. Included in the comparison is an analysis of a number of functional and non-functional requirements. Including in this document are the following digital health tools: DHIS2, SORMAS, Go.Data, EpiInfo, CommCare, ODK, Kobo Toolbox, Excel and non-digital paper tools. This comparison is a dynamic document meant for community updates that can be accessed here. If you would like to make updates including adding additional tools or information to tools included, please contact Carl Fourie.

Additional COVID Resources

COVID-19 Webinars

October 28, 2020 | Global Good COVID-19 Adaptations Part III (OpenLMIS and OpenELIS)

This webinar focuses on how both OpenLMIS and OpenELIS have adapted their technologies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

October 7, 2020 | Global Good COVID-19 Adaptations Part II (DHIS2 and mHero)

This webinar focuses on how both DHIS2 and mHero have adapted their technologies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

June 16, 2020 | Can Image-based AI Meaningfully Impact COVID-19 Response in Low Resource Settings

This webinar explores the opportunities and challenges for the use of imaged-based AI tools in the COVID-19 response. Panelists discuss the broader context for the application of these tools; explore how they are being developed and evaluated; and identify what steps need to be taken to maximize the potential of image-based AI while mitigating the risks.

June 15, 2020 | Understanding the Unique Challenges & Opportunities of Combating COVID-19 in LMICs

April 30, 2020 | Private Sector Digital Adaptations for COVID-19 Response

In this webinar, leaders from the Digital Impact Alliance, Facebook, mClinica, Microsoft, and Tableau shared how to leverage private sector tools and technologies to strengthen health systems in COVID-19 response efforts.

April 7, 2020 | Managing the Global COVID-19 Pandemic with Health Informatics

In partnership with AMIA, this webinar shares informatics responses and challenges within the COVID-19 pandeimc.

March 30, 2020 | Global Goods Adaptation for COVID-19 Response Part I

This webinar features a set of Digital Square-approved digital health global goods that have adapted their technologies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

March 26, 2020 | Re-utilizing PEPFAR Investments during the COVID-19 Response This webinar showcases how PEPFAR investments can be re-utilized in the COVID-19 response. During this session, we will feature a mix of digital tools including DATIM, Patient Level Monitoring, and the Global Open Facility Registry, and how they can be harnessed in the COVID-19 global response.

Digital Square Web Articles

Digital Square Information

What We Do

Digital Square addresses the need for a thriving marketplace for health.

We work in three key ways:

  • Identify promising investment opportunities and provides operational support to streamline procurement
  • Promote the development, adoption, and reuse of digital health global goods, and helps increase their availability, adaptability, and maturity
  • Elevate country priorities and strengthen regional and national digital health capacity

Governance

Digital Square's investments follow detailed governance processes that leverage a Peer Review Committee, Board, and Investment Review Committee. Additionally, Digital Square serves as the Secretariat for DIAL's Health-Sustainability Advisory Group.

Investors

Digital Square is funded in partnership with USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a consortium of other donors. A full list can be found on the Digital Square website.

Global Goods

Global Goods are digital health tools that are adaptable to different countries and contexts. There are three types of global goods:

  • Software: A software tool that is free and open source (FOSS), and used to manage, analyze, or transmit health-related data, with proven utility in several settings.
  • Services: A software tool that is used to manage, transmit, or analyze health-related data that can be freely accessed as a software service and adheres to open data principles.
  • Content A resource, toolkit, or data standard that is available under an open license and that is used to improve or analyze health data management processes.

A mature digital health software global good is software that is (frequently) Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), is supported by a strong community, has a clear governance structure, is funded by multiple sources, has been deployed at significant scale, is used across multiple countries, has demonstrated effectiveness, is designed to be interoperable, and is an emergent standard application.

About Digital Square Global Goods

Approved global goods include those which have submitted applications in response to a Notice. These include applications for specific work packages in response to a Notice. The applications are reviewed by the Digital Square Peer Review Committee and Investment Review Committee. The Digital Square Board approves the applications, or partial application work packages. An "Approved Digital Square Global Good" is not a formally vetted global good. Approved Digital Square global goods cover nearly all of the World Health Organization Digital Health Intervention Classifications. Many global goods are adaptable to support multiple interventions.

Read more:


Presence of global goods in countries

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Digital Square Investments in Global Goods


Approved Digital Square global goods

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Investment Processes

The Global Goods Community

Global Good Resources


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External Resources

Digital Square Resources

Digital Health & Interoperability Working Group

The Digital Health & Interoperability Working Group (DH&I WG) is a volunteer community of practice dedicated to strengthening country health systems and outcomes through the appropriate and responsible use of digital information technologies.

Gender Small Working Group

Contact Us

About

Digital Square is a PATH-led initiative funded and designed by the United States Agency of International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a consortium of other donors.

The Digital Square wiki is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development. The contents are the responsibility of PATH and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.

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