AeHIN WC Members from 14 Countries develop a call to action for strengthening digital health ecosystems in Asia at the GAPS Writeshop

Selangor, Malaysia – AeHIN facilitated a digital health GAPS (Governance, Architecture, People and program management, and Standards and interoperability) Writeshop on 14-15 May 2023 at the National Institutes of Health, Selangor, Malaysia. 

Thirty-three attendees from Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Viet Nam joined the GAPS writeshop in person. Three representatives from India, Malaysia, and Nepal also participated online via Zoom.

Building from last year’s second iteration of the GAPS 2.0 assessment, AeHIN organized a GAPS Writeshop to develop a call to action for strengthening digital health ecosystems in Asia. Leveraging best practices in South and South East Asia, the writeshop focused on the ‘Fill the GAPS’ aspect of the framework, wherein participants recommended practical action items to help national digital health implementers address cross-cutting digital health challenges in the region. 

In this writeshop, participants from the government, academe, and civil societies designed a three-level content outline as a basis for the consolidated digital health call-to-action intended for high-level decision-makers. This showed how governments, academe, and civil societies could work together to implement the country’s digital health strategy. The envisioned form of the call-to-action is a whitepaper that could be used by different stakeholders to lobby for the institutionalization of foundational digital health components, namely GAPS, at the country level. 

Select participants from the writeshop also presented national digital health use cases based on the ‘Mind the GAPS, Fill the GAPS Framework,’ which showcased unique country experiences in strengthening digital health components. The use cases highlighted outcomes of digital health initiatives in terms of impact on health systems, patients, or healthcare providers.

For the next steps, AeHIN will launch the GAPS whitepaper in the forthcoming 2023 AeHIN General Meeting with the theme, “Ensuring Digital Health for Better Outcomes: Putting Blueprints to Practice” on November 6-9, 2023, in Jakarta, Indonesia.