Digital health is the use of digital tools and data to deliver and run health care: electronic records in a clinic, an SMS reminder for a vaccine, a national system that shows where medicines are running out, an AI model that reads a scan. Across Africa it is no longer a side project. Countries are building national platforms, and the field needs people who understand both health and technology.
You do not need to be an engineer, or a doctor, to start. You need curiosity, a willingness to learn how health systems actually work, and a habit of asking whether a tool helps the people it is meant for.
Start where you are
Pick the path closest to you. Every path ends in the same place: real work, alongside people who are already doing it.
Students and early career
- Learn the vocabulary first. Read WHO's Classification of digital interventions, services and applications in health. It gives you a shared language for what digital health tools actually do.
- Take one free course and finish it. OpenWHO and the DHIS2 Academy both offer free online courses.
- Build something small and show it. A dashboard on open data, a short analysis, or a write-up of how a system works in your country is worth more than a list of certificates.
- Look for fellowships and internships on our Opportunities board, checked against the source by an editor.
Clinicians and health workers
You already know what most digital projects get wrong: the workflow. That is your advantage.
- Become the clinical voice on a digital project where you work: test the forms, report what slows care down, help train colleagues.
- Learn how health data is structured. Read the plain-language FHIR overview and browse ICD-11, the WHO classification of diseases.
- Learn a real system. If your country uses DHIS2 or OpenMRS, explore the DHIS2 demo or the OpenMRS community.
- Write about what you see. Field lessons from clinicians are what the Digest exists for. Pitch one.
Tech people entering health
Health is not just another market. Data is sensitive, lives depend on uptime, and the best tool is often the one that already exists.
- Learn the standards before you build. Start with HL7 FHIR and OpenHIE, the open architecture many national health information exchanges follow.
- Contribute to an open-source global good instead of starting from scratch. The Global Goods Guidebook lists tools that countries already use; DHIS2 and OpenMRS have active developer communities.
- Practise on safe data. Synthea generates realistic synthetic patient records, so you never need real patient data to learn.
- Follow the Principles for Digital Development: design with users, build for sustainability, reuse and improve.
Policy and programme staff
Most failures are not technical. They are about ownership, funding and workflow (read why pilots fail, and Here lies another pilot).
- Know the strategies your work sits inside: WHO's Global strategy on digital health, the Africa CDC digital transformation strategy, and your own national digital health strategy.
- Use the WHO–ITU National eHealth Strategy Toolkit to structure a strategy or a review.
- See where countries stand on the Global Digital Health Monitor.
- Plan for the day the grant ends. Read our seven building blocks and digital public infrastructure editions before the next project starts.
Foundations worth knowing
Whatever your path, these come up again and again:
- Interoperability: systems that can exchange and use each other's data. Read the global push for FHIR.
- Governance and data protection: who owns health data, who may use it, and how patients are protected. Read AI diagnostics and data sovereignty.
- Workforce and capacity: tools only work when people are trained and supported. Read the health workforce crisis and co-created capacity building.
- Equity: who is left out when care goes digital. Read the digital divide in telehealth.
Find your people
Digital health is learned in communities as much as in courses.
- The Global Digital Health Network connects practitioners worldwide.
- The DHIS2 Community of Practice and OpenMRS Talk are where implementers and developers ask and answer real questions.
- WHO Academy and OpenWHO keep adding courses for health workers.
Your next three steps
- Subscribe to the Digest to get each new edition by email, written by people doing this work.
- Follow a topic that matches your path: systems and interoperability, AI and data, policy and financing, public health, health workforce or supply chain and logistics.
- Share what you learn. Once you have a lesson from the field, write for the Digest. Every contributor started somewhere.