Standardising digital health interventions in Uganda’s health system using an enterprise architecture approach

Digital Health (DH) holds the potential to transform healthcare in Low- and Middle-income countries (LMICs) such as Uganda by enhancing access, security, and cost-effectiveness. Uganda’s health system faces many DH challenges, including fragmentation, duplication, interoperability, and security and privacy of health data. Enterprise Architecture (EA), which promotes a systems-thinking approach to digitalisation, has the potential to address the DH challenges encountered by LMICs. This study sought to leverage the EA approach to standardise DH interventions to facilitate an integrated, scalable, and interoperable DH ecosystem in Uganda. The study followed the Design Science methodology to design the Digital Health Enterprise Architecture Framework (DHEAF) tailored for Uganda’s health system. Using the Delphi technique, the DHEAF was validated in three stakeholder workshops involving purposively selected participants that included DH stakeholders (enterprise architects, ICT specialists, policymakers, practitioners, and health informaticians). Findings indicate that the DHEAF components met the unique DH needs for Uganda’s health system. Also, the framework was deemed adaptable, user-friendly, and capable of standardising DH interventions in Uganda’s health system. This study suggests that the DHEAF has the potential to standardise Uganda’s DH ecosystem and can be leveraged by other LMICs facing similar DH challenges.