Publication: Transforming Health Care in Lesotho: Using Digital Health to Overcome Health System Challenges
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2025-01-21
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2025-01-21
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Healthcare access and service delivery quality have been a persistent challenge in Lesotho. The COVID-19 pandemic has added new challenges and opportunities for change. Among those changes is the need to include digital health solutions and think about how new digital health interventions can enhance efficiency and transform the way primary healthcare is being provided or delivered in the country. This report, prepared by the World Bank for Lesotho’s Ministry of Health, documents the outcome of an assessment of Lesotho’s digital health system using a unique digital health assessment toolkit produced by the World Bank. The agreed objectives of the assessment were to 1) clarify the current digital health landscape in Lesotho, 2) develop a maturity score for Lesotho’s digital health system, 3) define the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) facing digital health in Lesotho and 4) Using the results of the assessment, provide recommendations and a phased roadmap of action to define the key strategic actions to move Lesotho’s digital health ecosystem to the next phase of its evolution. Based on the assessment results, 16 strategic recommendations have been made on foundational, functional, and frontier investments to advance the digital health agenda and improve service delivery. The prioritization of the actions has been based on this set of criteria: the most urgent to support PHC transformation, the incomplete actions from the current draft of the e-Health Strategy (2019-2023), and those with the most important long-term impact. This report is a call to action to upgrade the current eHealth strategy to a comprehensive digital health strategy with priority interventions, a costed implementation plan, and provisions for future impact assessment geared toward delivering better health in a digital world.
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“World Bank. 2025. Transforming Health Care in Lesotho: Using Digital Health to Overcome Health System Challenges. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42702 License: CC BY 4.0 IGO.”
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