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Govt urged to fast-track legislation regulating digital health
Digital health can be used to improve access to healthcare services, such as telemedicine, which can provide remote access to healthcare professionals.
What you need to know:
- The benefits of digital health include disease tracking, facilitating research on health systems, improving healthcare delivery, and promoting healthier behaviors through wearable and mobile apps.
With the rise of mobile connectivity and digital innovations, the government has been urged to expedite the development of legislation regulating digital health.
Prof Sharifah Sekalala from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom emphasized the need for a legal framework to keep pace with the rapid evolution of digital health, similar to other technological advancements.
“This is an important emerging area, it impacts people’s lives but also another key factor is to do with because every provider does what they want, so if you don’t have a regulatory system, you are bound to get into a such a mess and going back is difficult because people are so entrenched,” Prof Sekalala said on Tuesday, during a stakeholders dialogue on scaling up of digital health regulation organised by Ahaki, a civil society organisation in Kampala.
She added: “For me, there is a sense of urgency because innovation is very quick, it's embedded in communities and so if these products already exist, the digital apps, then for me, a huge governance function is needed. Of course, this is also about people’s lives.”
Digital health encompasses various forms, including health information technology, mobile health (mHealth), wearable devices, telehealth, telemedicine, and personalized medicine. It also includes mobile medical apps and software that assist healthcare providers in making clinical decisions for accurate diagnoses and treatments.
The benefits of digital health include disease tracking, facilitating research on health systems, improving healthcare delivery, and promoting healthier behaviors through wearable and mobile apps.
However, Mr Solomon Muhumuza, a Data Governance and Security Specialist from the Ministry of Health, argued that there is no immediate need for new legislation, as existing frameworks already govern digital health.
“As a country, we have sufficient regulations in place like the Data Protection and Privacy Act, Computer Misuse Act, the Electronic Transactions Act, so as a country, we have various regulations in place that enable us to implement properly but as well, we have policies, like the health policy which has a provision for digital health,”Mr Muhumuza said.
“From our assessment as a country, we don’t need a digital health law because we have enough laws to be able to implement what we need in our circumstances.” He added.
He advocated for a nationwide rollout of digital health innovations at the district level to achieve the goals set out in the National Development Plan III and Vision 2024, which aim to leverage technology and ICT for better health service delivery.
As part of the shift towards digital health, Mr. Muhumuza explained that hospitals are transitioning from paper-based patient data collection to computer-based systems.
“This means that this health worker has a certain app running on a computer. We have rolled this out in 18 districts so far where community health workers have health apps on their smartphones and what is running on the phone is an application that we call the community health information system where we do registration of households, record your details for subsequent visits and tracking a patient over time so that doctors can diagnose you better,” he said.
