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A new digital health innovation toolkit, developed by Indonesian health leaders with Australian researchers, aims to help hospitals design and implement value-based digital health initiatives and address persistent challenges in scaling digital health transformation across Indonesia.
Indonesian fellows of the Australia Awards Fellowship programme came up with the Value-Based Digital Health Innovation Canvas (VDHIC) together with digital health researchers at Monash University.
WHAT IT'S ABOUT
Based on a media release, the VDHIC provides a clear, step-by-step framework for hospitals and healthcare providers to design and implement digital health initiatives aimed at improving five areas: population health, patient experience, provider satisfaction, cost efficiency and health equity.
It also embeds regulatory, clinical, data, and technology governance from the outset, including planning for how new digital solutions will integrate with Indonesia's national health data platform, SATUSEHAT. Hospitals, regulators, and technology providers are expected to demonstrate how initiatives could improve outcomes in those five key areas through defined evidence pathways.
Crucially, the framework supports Indonesian healthcare's shift from compliance reporting towards value-based digital health, according to Monash University IT professor Juliana Sutanto, who leads the VDHIC collaboration.
Setiaji Setiaji, chief of the Digital Transformation Office at the Indonesian Ministry of Health, was quoted as saying that the VDHIC will inform ongoing development of digital health policies. "Indonesia is creating pathways for responsible digital health innovation through innovation, industrial, and regulatory sandboxing. The VDHIC offers practical guidance to ensure innovation aligns with governance, safety, and value-based outcomes."
The media release noted the project's strong focus on eastern Indonesia, "where health system capacity and digital infrastructure are more limited." The toolkit pushes innovators not just to identify beneficiaries, but also to assess technological readiness, digital literacy, and infrastructure conditions early to ensure digital health initiatives are designed to deliver value across regions with differing levels of capacity.
The VDHIC will be integrated into Indonesia's Ministry of Health sandbox program, Monash University mentioned.
WHY IT MATTERS
Prof Sutanto's team noted from their engagements with Indonesian health leaders and professionals that innovations in digital health "stall after successful pilots" due to a "tech-first thinking" that views technology as an innovation "instead of a solution to a health problem."
The toolkit their team developed for the Indonesian health system shifts from that approach towards a "value-first push."
"The canvas starts with what the specific health challenge and what the digital innovation aims to improve," Prof Sutanto explained to Healthcare IT News.
"In Indonesia, it means from inception, the innovators will have to plan how the digital innovation will be integrated into SATUSEHAT." Planning for SATUSEHAT integration from the start, she said, will ensure alignment with the Indonesian Ministry of Health's digital initiative.
She cited change resistance and duplicated purpose as two common pitfalls that Indonesian health organisations encounter when trying to implement digital solutions.
"The potential users, such as doctors and nurses, are not involved during the planning and design phases, and the stakeholders' ecosystem, which may include the regional health agencies and hospital administrators, is not identified and consulted. When it is implemented, the users feel that it is an unnecessary add-on to their daily work activities."
"There are a plethora of applications with similar purposes not only across, but also often within the healthcare facilities, making it challenging to unify them."
THE LARGER TREND
The nine fellows who took part in Round 20 of the Australia Awards include members of Indonesia's Ministry of Health Technical Working Group, as well as clinicians and researchers from across the country. The fellowship programme builds networks of leaders by facilitating partnerships between Australian organisations and partner organisations.
In recent years, the Indonesian Health Ministry sought international partnerships to help accelerate the digital transformation of the country's health system. Early this year, it entered into a tripartite agreement to establish the Joint Laboratory for Digital Medicine and Proactive Health with Badan Standardisasi Nasional (National Standardisation Agency) and Xuzhou Medical University in China. The joint lab focuses on the safe and regulated use of digital technology, including AI in medicine.
In July, the Indonesian MOH signed a long-term partnership with Royal Philips, with digital health integration identified as one of the key focus areas of their collaboration.
Late last year, the MOH announced the integration of an AI serving as a personal health assistant into the SATUSEHAT mobile application. A year prior, it announced a partnership with Google Cloud to explore the application of generative AI to the national digital health platform.
