Digital Frontier for Healthcare Transformation: An Integrated Care Review of Namibian E-Health Strategy

Abstract

This paper stands at a key position in merging two prevailing trends within the healthcare public administration context: digitalization and integrated care (IC). These initiatives are introduced as solutions to solve challenges connected with the administration of chronic and multi-morbid conditions, which constitute a significant portion of healthcare expenditures in developing nations, including Namibia. In pursuit of these aims, the objectives are to navigate the digital frontier; we shall identify the obstacles hindering the development of the Namibian e-health strategy's digital health platform ecosystem (DHPE) and proffer recommendations for addressing these impediments. Ultimately, we aspire to establish an innovative DHPE-STS (Socio-Technical Solutions) that will proficiently direct the future of the Namibian e-health strategy. The prevalent fragmentation in service delivery, connected with rapid technological advancements, contributed to the inefficiencies in service delivery. To alleviate fragmentation, IC models have been implemented in developed nations and stand to significantly benefit from the advent of evolving electronic health platform solutions ecosystems (EHPs). Still, these interventions are relatively complicated and suffer from a lack of comprehensive analysis. Accordingly, this study examines these emerging solutions through an integrative literature review and a qualitative analysis, identifying 27 comprehensive platform solutions that facilitate coordination within chronic care ecosystems and develop innovative DHP oriented towards socio-technical considerations for the Namibian eHealth strategy. The findings provide an in-depth overview of the prevalent barriers and gaps associated with the 27 platform solutions examined, alongside a consolidative synthesis that conceptualizes socio-technical solution architectures, thereby integrating the components of people, processes, and technology within a multi-level IC framework. This clarifies the difficult orchestration required for managing cross-provider solutions in chronic care and enhances the understanding of researchers and decision-makers regarding the complexities and challenges inherent in healthcare transformation. Furthermore, development barriers and gaps warranting further research are also scrutinized.