eHealth policy framework in Low and Lower Middle-Income Countries; a PRISMA systematic review and analysis.

backgroundLow and lower middle-income countries suffer lack of healthcare providers and proper workforce education programs, a greater spread of illnesses, poor surveillance, efficient management, etc., which are addressable by a central policy framework implementation. Accordingly, an eHealth policy framework is required specifically for these countries to successfully implement eHealth solutions. This study explores existing frameworks and fills the gap by proposing an eHealth policy framework in the context of developing countries.

methodsThis PRISMA-based (PRISMA Preferred Reporting Items For Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) systematic review used Google Scholar, IEEE, Web of Science, and PubMed latest on 23

resultsMost of these publications do not develop or synthesize new frameworks for eHealth policy implementation, but rather introduce eHealth implementation frameworks, explain policy dimensions, identify and extract relevant components of existing frameworks or point out legal or other relevant eHealth implementation issues.

conclusionAfter a thorough exploration of related literature, this study identified the main factors affecting an effective eHealth policy framework, found a gap in the context of developing countries, and proposed a four-step eHealth policy implementation guideline for successful implementation of eHealth in the context of developing. The limitation of this study is the lack of a proper amount of practically implemented eHealth policy framework cases in developing countries published in the literature for the review. Ultimately, this study is part of the BETTEReHEALTH (More information about the BETTEReHEALTH project at https://betterehealth.eu ) project funded by the European Union Horizon's 2020 under agreement number 101017450.