P4PPP: Behind the screen

The Commonwealth Centre for Digital Health (CWCDH) has developed the Digital Framework for “Universal Health Systems for Planet, Place and People”. Based upon this framework, an easy to use and accessible on-line platform was developed, and it was named as Digital Platform for Planet, Place and People (P4PPP).

The main goal of this P4PPP is to enlist validated open-source digital tools that are already available with the aim of facilitating low and middle-income countries to select according to their requirement.

Objectives of this process was as follows:

• Identify key areas where digital health solutions are implemented aimed at all ten categories of the P4PPP system.

• List main tools and applications developed and implemented successfully under each area globally

• Evaluate each tool for equity, effectivity, safety, accessibility and sustainability and any other criteria or quality standards demanded by users

• Develop a platform with a repository or contact base where health care providers can easily search, identify and obtain digital health solutions with recommendations that suite their needs.

• Establish a mechanism for continuous update of the platform with addition of emerging solutions and technologies

Methodology:

1. Systematic review to identify tools and applications for mapping with toolkit

Here both published and grey literature was searched for available digital health solutions that comes within the scope. Further, other sources like Git-Hub, Git-bucket and Source Forge were searched.

2. Furbishing the developed framework with identified and categorised solutions

Once these systems were identified, they were categorized into 10 groups given into the P4PPP framework. They were, Governance, Knowledge, Capacity, Advocacy, Protect, Prevent, Promote, People, Planet and Place.

3. Evaluation of the systems that were entered into the P4PPP system.

To evaluate the digital health solutions, a scoring system was developed following studying many software evaluation mechanisms in the literature. The novel scoring system is based on 12 properties of the digital health solutions and it is being incorporated into the developed P4PPP.

The next step of the P4PPP is to appoint a panel of evaluators who can continue the system evaluation process with future submission of new systems once the P4PPP framework is up and running.

2020-11-17