Use of e-health programmes to deliver urban primary health-care services for noncommunicable diseases in middle-income countries

Overview

The widespread availability and use of information and communications technology tools offer the potential of transforming health promotion and health care. Many hold the view that e-health might bring particular benefits for MICs as they struggle with more limited resources and larger disease burdens than what high-income countries face. ICTs offer the potential to support the provision of preventive and primary health services, and chronic care services.

This policy brief presents a synthesis of the insights gained from systematic reviews of the published scientific as well as grey literature and in-depth interviews in four MICs – China, Nepal, Philippines and Kenya. MICs have to deal with an increasing burden of NCDs but have different demographic structures, socioeconomic status and e-health development landscape. The focus of this brief is on the use of e-health at the PHC level for NCD management in urban settings. Findings reveal that a wide range of e-health services are already in use in urban primary care settings. The study also highlighted that the WHO definition of e-health was generally well understood and agreed upon by most of the interviewed policy-makers, experts, PHC providers and patients. Most stakeholders had a positive attitude towards e-health, and highlighted the role of governance and leadership, funding and access to hardware and infrastructure, user acceptance and motivation, as some of the facilitators for the uptake of e-health. Barriers identified included the absence of facilitating factors as well as concerns over legal issues, data security, conflicts of interest, language barriers, and digital literacy.

Based on the findings of the qualitative study and scoping review, the authors present policy recommendations across the different levels of implementation for e-Health: national and subnational levels, and local facility levels, and at the level of the individual. 

How to Cite this publication

Xiong S, Palileo-Villanueva L, Shrestha A, Otieno P, Lu H and Yan L. Use of e-health programmes to deliver urban primary health-care services for noncommunicable diseases in middle-income countries. New Delhi: World Health Organization Regional Office for South-East Asia; 2021.