Platformable's Global Health Policy Policy Assessment Framework

To assess health policy maturity in each country, we used the core set of 15 indicators in our digital health policy maturity assessment model.

The design of our model and its comparison with other digital health policy assessment models is discussed here: https://platformable.com/blog/global-digital-health-policy-maturity (opens in a new tab)

In our model, digital health policy maturity characteristics are grouped into three categories:

• Infrastructure: The data infrastructure, legal frameworks, institutions and policies that foster digital ecosystems
• Access and implementation: The strategies and guidelines, processes, and enablement factors that support digital ecosystems to achieve their goals and generate benefits/value
• Participation: The approaches that enable data to be shared and for stakeholders and new market players to enter and compete and collaborate responsibly, ethically and equitably.

Governance is treated as a cross-cutting issue as there are specific governance approaches that we assess for how infrastructure is managed (organisational governance), to oversee access and implementation (data stewardship and regulatory frameworks for data protection and use), and for participation (focused on governance to support a cross-section of stakeholders to participate in the ecosystem), as shown in the following diagram:

Our indicator framework includes up to 25 indicators. For this study in partnership with Roche Canada, we selected 15 indicators, shown in darker shades in the following diagram:

Our assessment methodology is based on a review of available source documents from each country, in particular any documented digital health or e-health strategies. Occasionally, these are published as part of a wider digital strategy or as a component of a population health strategy. There are also a range of supplemental documents that are reviewed, including interoperability strategies, data protection and health data access regulations and legislations, and budget papers. For these studies, we are assessing the digital maturity based on strategy design. Ideally, this would be coupled with an implementation assessment score that measures how much of a digital health strategy has been progressed since the plan was published, and whether the implementation activities are aligned with the the intended goals. This is mostly avoided in this study, although where supplemental materials are published, such as in the case of Canada (from the Medical Association’s Interoperability Taskforce) and from Sweden (where the Treasury Department assessed the strategy implementation progress), these are incorporated into the maturity assessment.

Indicators Scoring Methdoology

The tooltips on the comparison dashboard show how each indicator is scored. Consult the downloadable report from the top menu for more detailed discussion of the indicator methodology.