Digital health to strengthen pediatric surgical referral and follow-up in Low-resource settings: progress, gaps, and future directions.

Timely referral and effective postoperative follow-up remain major challenges in pediatric surgical care in low-resource settings, where geographic barriers, workforce shortages, fragmented communication, and weak health-system coordination often disrupt continuity of care. Digital health has emerged as a potentially practical approach to addressing these pathway failures through tools such as teleconsultation, mobile messaging, image sharing, and remote postoperative contact. This mini review examines current applications of digital health in pediatric surgical referral and follow-up, with particular attention to their emerging value, implementation barriers, and future directions. Existing studies suggest that relatively simple digital tools may improve referral coordination, facilitate specialist input, reduce unnecessary travel, support caregiver communication, and strengthen postoperative continuity. However, the available evidence remains uneven and is still dominated by pilot studies, small observational designs, and context-specific implementation experiences. Important concerns also persist regarding infrastructure constraints, digital inequity, workflow integration, privacy, governance, and long-term sustainability. Current research has focused more heavily on postoperative follow-up than on referral and triage, leaving important parts of the pediatric surgical pathway underexplored. Overall, digital health shows genuine promise for strengthening pediatric surgical systems in low-resource settings, but its impact will depend on equitable implementation, stronger evaluation, and integration into routine care pathways rather than isolated technological adoption.