About this Guidebook

About Digital Square

Since its inception in 2016, Digital Square at PATH has worked with ministries of health to align adaptable, interoperable digital technologies with local health needs. Digital Square brings partners together to improve how the global community designs, uses, and pays for digital health tools and approaches to advance health equity through digital transformation.

The Digital Square initiative grew out of lessons learned during the 2014- 2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, where the uncoordinated use of digital tools complicated response efforts. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the need for digital tools to support the collection and use of health data, and it has underscored the importance of coordination in the digital health sector.

Digital Square provides a mechanism to foster alignment and coordination among investors, implementers, and innovators to reinforce one another in hearing, understanding, and supporting country priorities. Digital Square’s resources, coalitions, and its portfolio of digital health global goods support large-scale, high-quality, sustainable implementations of digital health interventions.

For more information about Digital Square, visit digitalsquare.org.

What are Global Goods?

Digital Square defines global goods as digital health tools that are adaptable to different countries and contexts to help address key health system challenges. Global goods can take several shapes and forms, often work in conjunction with other global goods, and can fulfill many of the technology needs of a health system. Some of these characteristics are drawn from the Principles for Digital Development.

The advancement of global goods is crucial for saving lives and improving health around the world because these free and open source digital health tools can be used across different countries and health program verticals, cutting down on fragmentation and duplication to accelerate scale and health impact. For example, a global good used for HIV case management can also be used to manage care for malaria or tuberculosis.

Benefits of Global Goods

Since global goods are open source tools, there are multiple benefits to their use:

• Many developers can contribute to a global good, thereby reducing the risk of vendor lock-in; a situation in which customers are unable to switch providers/developers without a substantial cost.
• Source code is freely available and modifiable, creating more opportunities for collaboration across organizations and health programs areas.
• The cost of new feature development and software maintenance is more likely to be shared across users and supporters of global goods, freeing up resources for adaptation and implementation.
• Software development best practices in requirements gathering and user acceptance testing have already been undertaken, so resources can be focused elsewhere.
• Interoperability leads to improved data analysis and synthesis, enhanced support for continuity of care as clients engage at multiple points of service across the health care system, and reduced costs for data acquisition and management.
• Many of the global goods represented in this guidebook already support interoperability standards, in particular the standards identified in the OpenHIE architecture.

How does a digital health tool become a Digital Square global good?

Digital Square identifies global goods through our Open Application Process (OAP). Digital Square’s OAP provides an iterative process that gives applicants the opportunity to find collaborators and provide and receive feedback from peers.

Global Goods vs DPGs

In short, all Global Goods are Digital Public Goods, but not all Digital Public Goods are Global Goods.

• Digital public goods (DPGs) are open source software, open data, open artificial intelligence (AI) models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across many sectors including health, agriculture, education, finance, climate, etc.
• Many developers can contribute to a global good, thereby reducing the risk of vendor lock-in; a situation in which customers are unable to switch providers/developers without a substantial cost.
• Digital Square global goods have a close relationship to DPGs: they must also meet the nine indicators outlined in the DPG Standard.
• Digital Square exclusively evaluates solutions relevant to the health sector whereas DPGs are for all SDGs and across multiple sectors.
• Digital Square facilitates a peer review process that assesses maturity across several criteria that is essential to “awarding” the title of Digital Square global good. In contrast, DPGs have no maturity requirement.
• While Digital Square closely coordinates with the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) to align the approval processes for global goods and DPGs, a DPG nominee may not be approved by the DPGA, but could still be approved as a Digital Square global good.

In short, all Global Goods are Digital Public Goods, but not all Digital Public Goods are Global Goods.