ABSTRACT
Bangladesh has made remarkable progress in digital health in recent years. Through one of theworld’s largest deployments to date of the open-source District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2),the country now has a national public sector health data warehouse. Information from previouslyfragmented data systems is now unified in a common data repository, enabling data exchange forhealth information systems and decision-making. Work is ongoing to create lifetime electronic healthrecords for all citizens that can be transferred between health facilities. Extensive customization ofopen-source software has laid the foundations for a national digital networking system. Initiativeshave focused on producing digital solutions to aid priorities such as strengthening the health systemas a whole as well as supporting specific technical interventions, for example improving the civilregistration and vital statistics system. Digital solutions have also supported the Bangladesh healthworkforce strategy through a set of registries that electronically captures and maintains humanresource information for the entire public health sector, including monitoring staff attendance throughthe use of low-cost biometric fingerprint time-attendance machines. Citizens are encouraged toengage in shaping health services via a web-based complaints and suggestions system, and a newsystem to raise health awareness via public digital displays has started in Dhaka. Strong support atthe highest political level has been critical to the success of efforts to introduce these innovations.The endeavour has also generated a cadre of enthusiastic eHealth proponents, who are focusedon further strengthening and expanding the existing systems and on harnessing the vast amount ofinformation amassed at the central data repository through big data analysis, artificial intelligence andmachine learning.