About Digital Square

Digital tools can provide better access to higher-quality health services at lower costs for all. Countries around the world are transforming their health systems to take advantage of digital tools, approaches, and the data they generate as they work toward universal health coverage. Successful transformations take into account local infrastructure, capacity, and other contextual factors in determining how digital tools can best support local health systems. While digital approaches vary across contexts, achieving health equity increasingly depends on ensuring that everyone, everywhere, has access to and benefits from health care enhanced by appropriate digital technologies.

Strong digital health systems equip governments and decision-makers with the information they need, when they need it, to achieve better health outcomes for all. Digital Square aims to strengthen country-led efforts to develop national digital health infrastructure. We ensure these efforts are supported by coordinated investments and a curated selection of high-quality digital health tools.

Digital Square is a digital health marketplace—or ‘square’—where supply and demand come together to accelerate health equity.

A longstanding lack of coordination in digital health has resulted in an imbalanced and fragmented marketplace, where available tools and investment mechanisms do not match the long-term needs of countries or communities. To accelerate health equity through the development, adoption, scale, and delivery of digital health innovations, Digital Square focuses on creating better alignment and coordination.

Digital Square brings partners together to improve how the global community designs, uses, and pays for digital health tools and approaches. We work with innovators to advance adaptable, replicable tools that are designed to work together seamlessly. We partner with governments and country-based technology experts to strengthen local capacity to implement and manage digital health programs. We also work with donors to identify new investment approaches that ensure long-term success and align with country priorities. By strengthening coordination among these partners, Digital Square helps reorient the market to better match tools and approaches to the needs of countries and communities.

Digital Square brings technical, operational, and advocacy expertise to address well-recognized barriers to scaling digital health. Our strong partnerships across the sector allow us to identify challenges in different areas of the marketplace and jointly design new approaches to overcome them. Our work focuses on three key areas: alignment and coordination, global goods, and regional and country support.

Alignment and co-investment

Better alignment and coordination in the digital health sector support a healthy marketplace of digital health tools and approaches that can be sustained while maximizing the impact of every dollar spent to improve health equity. Digital Square helps identify promising investment opportunities and provides operational support to streamline procurement.

Digital public goods for health

Global goods are adaptable, interoperable, open-source software or content designed to meet the data and management needs of country health systems. Digital Square promotes the development, adoption, and reuse of digital health global goods and helps increase their availability, adaptability, and maturity.

Regional and country systems

Governments are leading the digital transformation of health care systems at regional, national, and subnational levels. Long-term sustainability requires new skillsets within health systems, which requires countries to reinforce both technical and operational capacity. Digital Square helps elevate country priorities and strengthen regional and national capacity.