**4. National planning of digital health**

Over 85 countries have developed their national eHealth plans, strategies or policies [70]. It is noted that some of the these are for ICT in general and health is part of that. The toolkit provides a road map for eHealth applications development and services to enable secure, relevant and cost-effective utilization of ICT in health. The national eHealth strategies aim to help the healthcare sector to improve the health outcomes using the ICT resources at the national level while considering fundamental elements in terms of regulatory, governance, standards, human capacity, financing and policy contexts and more important it aims at ensuring coordinated effort by the two sectors: Health and ICT in the country to produce seamless integration of ICT in health sector. This integration results from defining the common threads and links between national health strategies and national ICT strategies, where coordination, compatibility and interoperability of national, sub-national and local plans are considered and the provision of a platform for integration and joint work to develop shared solutions and systems. The national eHealth strategy seeks high level of

## *Improving Healthcare Access through Digital Health: The Use of Information… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99607*

transparency, accountability and return on investment to allow for meager resources in a country to be fully used as it supports the rationale and basis for investment in eHealth by the different stakeholders. In most cases the Ministries of Health have a lead role in the development with ministries of ICT and other stakeholders taking part. Other stakeholders may include:


While countries should focus on a range of structured activities that lead to the progressive development of a national eHealth strategy, WHO and the International Telecommunication Union developed the National eHealth strategy toolkit [71] as a tool to be used y countries that already have strategies in place or those that have embarked on development of new strategies. The way forward as provided by the Toolkit suggests:

