Digital health projects financing: challenges and opportunities
The article summarizes current trends in financial support for digital health in Ukraine, considering the requirements and recommendations of international institutions. The research goal is to identify problems and challenges in public funding in Ukraine and find effective ways to solve them based on world experience. The systematization of scientific sources and approaches to solving the problem of financing digital health projects has shown that most studies present the results on finding effective mechanisms for financing health care or technical aspects of digital health and its components. However, under the WHO report, the lack or insufficient level of sustainable funding is an insuperable obstacle for implementing digital health projects in most countries. Thus, the above confirmed the relevance of the investigated scientific problem. Methodical tools of this research were systematization, structural and comparative analyses, logical generalization. The practical implementation of the study was carried out using the tools of Excel 2016. In the study, the start point for gathering data was 2016, which is the beginning of the digital health transformation in Ukraine. For gaining the research goal, this study was conducted in the following logical sequence: analyzing the effectiveness and stability of budget funding for the electronic health record projects in Ukraine within the eHealth initiative; defining the current state of Telemedicine and Mobile Medicine financings; identifying the potential directions for solving the problem of lack of funding based on world experience; determining the innovative digital medicine projects implemented by startups; setting the relationship between the amount of venture financing, the maturity and number of employees of companies. Following the findings, the authors developed the recommendations to use AI, Big Data, blockchain technologies, the Internet of Things to establish cooperation between the private, public sectors, academia, and non-governmental organizations.