Landscape of Digital Infrastructure and Solutions: A Rapid Assessment for Lagos State Ministry for Health

Healthcare in Africa is undergoing rapid digital transformation and Lagos State is at the forefront of this transformation as the largest tech hub in Africa, with several innovators operating from Lagos. Associated with this rapid transformation is the challenge of limited coordination and regulation which results in fragmented deployment of digital health services and applications across the public and private sectors.

Lagos State is working to address this problem via the deployment of a Smart Health Information Platform (SHIP) as a core component of its digital health transformation strategy. A key step in developing and implementing this strategy is the establishment of a baseline of digital health readiness across Lagos State, which is designed to provide foundational data for the broader digital health transformation strategy development.

With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and under the guidance of the Lagos State Ministry of Health and HealthEnabled, Salient Advisory, in collaboration with Africa Insights and Technology Services Limited, conducted a rapid assessment of digital health readiness between April and July 2023. The goal of this project was to assess the state of digital health infrastructure enablers (electricity, mobile phones, computers, and other hardware), and the extent of adoption of digital applications among healthcare service points. We surveyed 901 private and public facilities, across primary and higher levels of care in Lagos State’s 20 Local Governments.

Our latest report, “Landscape of Digital Infrastructure and Solutions: A Rapid Assessment for Lagos State Ministry of Health” describes our findings on digital health readiness and explores opportunities to promote digital transformation within the healthcare sector in Lagos State.

We identified several infrastructure gaps that hinder the widespread adoption of digital health innovations across the state, including poor internet infrastructure, poor access to computing hardware, and weak data storage and retrieval systems. Over 75% of primary healthcare facilities surveyed reported not using any digital innovations in their daily operations, in part due to infrastructure deficits. Generally, higher-level care facilities and private pharmacies have better levels of adoption of digital applications compared to primary healthcare facilities.

Insights from the rapid assessment suggest the following opportunities to promote digital health transformation in Lagos State:

• Developing a plan to ensure reliable access to electricity and improve connectivity with official internet as the basis for digitally enabled services, across all facility levels.
• Because many digital health solutions will require investment in both infrastructure and devices to be utilized successfully, prioritizing using evidence- and needs-driven assessments is critical.
• Build digital linkages between government programs and private sector providers that are already digitally enabled, to rapidly expand access to care in Lagos State.
• Communicate healthcare system challenges to the innovation ecosystem to align innovators’ solutions with the healthcare priorities of the Lagos state government.
• Conduct longitudinal assessments of the health digital ecosystem to evaluate the impact of digital transformation on health in line with the Lagos State digital health transformation strategy.

To learn more, read the report. If you have questions about the health tech innovations in emerging markets, do not hesitate to get in touch.

Project team

This work was led by Abdullah Yusuf, Malyse Uwase, and Joshua Uka with support from Remi Adeseun and Mara Hansen Staples. Additional support for this work was provided by Asebhor Ebhomenye of ABA Healthcare.

Special thanks to our partners at the Lagos State Ministry of Health, HealthEnabled and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who provided invaluable guidance and partnership.

Read our latest report on Innovations in Digitizing Health Supply Chains in Africa.