Healthcare interoperability in Africa: the state of digital health in 2026

Across Africa, digital health has moved from pilot projects to national programmes. Most countries now have a strategy; many have donor-funded systems running in hospitals, laboratories and surveillance units. What is still missing, in most places, is the connection between them. This overview is written for ministries of health, development partners, insurers and hospital leadership. It follows the thread that runs through all of them: healthcare interoperability. All external facts are drawn from public sources cited in the text.

Why interoperability is now the bottleneck

The WHO Regional Office for Africa put the problem plainly in its 2021 framework for implementing the global digital health strategy. By the end of 2020, 34 Member States in the African Region had developed a digital health strategy, but only 12 had implemented it (WHO AFRO, 2021). The same document found that most Member States do not have harmonised digital health standards, and that the lack of a viable economic model undermines the sustainability of projects.

Its 2024 framework on integrating health data goes further. In several countries, it notes, surveillance systems and other programme systems are different and non-interoperable, so each programme reports separately, duplicating effort (WHO AFRO, 2024). In other words, Africa does not lack digital tools. It lacks the ability to make them work together.

The continental frameworks shaping 2026

WHO global strategy, extended to 2027

The WHO Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020-2025 was extended to 2027 by the Seventy-eighth World Health Assembly in May 2025, which also asked WHO to begin developing a new strategy for 2028-2033 (WHO, 2025). African health ministries therefore have a stable reference until 2027, and an opportunity to shape the next cycle.

WHO AFRO: standards and a regional data hub

The 2021 regional framework set a target for 2026: 60% of Member States with data standards and interoperability frameworks. It recommended national technical committees, bringing together ministries of health, ICT ministries, universities and private-sector actors, to define the technical specifications that ensure interoperability between national digital health systems. The 2024 framework adds a Regional Health Data Hub for 2024-2030, designed to integrate country and regional data (WHO AFRO, 2021 and 2024).

Smart Africa: towards a single digital health market

On 12 November 2025, the Smart Africa Board of Heads of State validated a Digital Health Blueprint aiming at a Single Digital Health Market for Africa, built on interoperable, people-centred health systems (Smart Africa, 2025). The alliance has 42 member states. Cross-border exchange of health data presupposes interoperability within each country first.

What interoperability means in practice

For a ministry or a funder, "interoperability" is easy to write into a strategy and hard to verify in a procurement. In practice it rests on four layers:

1. Identity. A unique patient identifier, and a registry of facilities and professionals, so that records can be matched across systems.
2. Exchange standards. Agreed ways for systems to send and receive information, such as HL7 messages and the integration profiles defined by IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise), which specify how established standards are used together.
3. Shared terminology. Common coding of diagnoses, tests and medicines, so that the data received means the same thing as the data sent.
4. Governance. Rules on who may access what, on what legal basis, with what audit trail, and where data is hosted. WHO AFRO's 2021 framework explicitly calls for stronger digital sovereignty and closer oversight of servers hosted abroad.

None of these layers requires replacing the systems already in place. In most countries, the realistic path is to connect existing hospital, laboratory, pharmacy and insurance systems through a shared exchange layer, governed nationally, rather than to impose a single application on every facility. That approach protects past investments, respects facilities' own choices and lets the private sector take part.

The decisive step is testing. Interoperability claims should be verified against recognised profiles before national rollout, not discovered after it. An IHE certification provides part of that evidence, for a given product and defined profiles. Eyone Medical's Yone-Wi interoperability engine obtained IHE certification in 2024, a first in Africa. Our article on IHE certification and the Yone-Wi engine explains what it covers, and our article on health systems interoperability explains what it changes for a health facility.

Country view: Senegal and Francophone Africa

Senegal

Senegal adopted a Digital Health Strategic Plan for 2018-2023, launched in January 2019 (Agence Ecofin, 2019). It has since been followed by a health system digitalisation programme under the Digital Economy Acceleration Project, PAENS (Senegalese Press Agency, 2023). Recent public milestones include:

• March 2024: official launch of the pilot phase of the single shared patient record (Senegalese Press Agency, 2024).
• April 2025: six flagship projects presented, including the electronic patient record, telemedicine, a hospital information system and a geographic health information system (Le Soleil, 2025).
• April 2025: a digital health bill announced, intended among other things to strengthen the protection of medical information and harmonise standards across public and private actors (Le Soleil, 2025).

Our in-depth article on electronic health records in Senegal covers the national patient record programme and, separately, Eyone Medical's own milestones, including the national EHR tender it won in 2023.

Connecting care and financing

Interoperability is not only clinical. Connecting health facilities to the bodies that pay for care is a programme in its own right. In 2025, Eyone Medical won the tender for Senegal's mandatory health insurance interoperability platform, which will connect all 177 IPMs, the employer-based health insurance schemes, to every health facility in the country. For insurers and IPMs, Eyone Medical offers Eyassur: beneficiary and contract management and electronic claims transmission.

Francophone Africa

Francophone countries share an administrative language, often similar health financing models, and the same structural challenges identified by WHO AFRO. In Côte d'Ivoire, universal health coverage raises very concrete billing and third-party payment questions, covered in our guide to hospital billing in Côte d'Ivoire. Eyone Medical operates in Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon, and deployed its solutions in Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon in 2024.

Public health: what connected data changes

Recent epidemics have shown that a health alert is only as fast as the information coming up from the field. Data written on paper at a health post, copied into a report and sent through another channel arrives late and incomplete. When patient records, laboratories and surveillance systems exchange data directly, reporting can become faster and more reliable. Building that system follows four steps: bring the actors together, agree on common standards, build exchange platforms that connect existing systems rather than replace them, and test before scaling.

The starting point is rarely a blank page. WHO AFRO's 2024 framework notes that DHIS2 is the most widely implemented health data management system in the African Region, but that not all countries use it as a single system, and that country tools range from stand-alone, offline applications to centralised web platforms (WHO AFRO, 2024). It also points to programmes that still depend on spreadsheets and manually compiled situation reports. For a ministry, the lesson is practical: the next investment should be judged less on what it adds than on what it connects. A new hospital information system that cannot report automatically to the national surveillance platform, or a laboratory system that cannot return results to the patient record, reproduces the fragmentation it was meant to solve.

Four questions for any digital health investment in 2026

• Does the system exchange data according to recognised standards, and has that been tested?
• Who hosts the data, and under which legal framework?
• Does the project connect care and its financing, or will the same services be re-entered for billing?
• Will the model survive the end of initial funding? WHO AFRO identifies the lack of a viable economic model as a weakness across the Region.

Where Eyone Medical fits

Eyone Medical is a medical interoperability platform. Founded in 2015, with more than 100 staff across three countries, it connects the actors of the care pathway rather than replacing their systems. It was named a Most Valuable Project by the World Bank's L'Afrique Excelle programme in 2018 and won the Africa's Business Heroes competition in 2025. Its solutions each serve one actor: Medical IS for health facilities, Eyassur for health financing bodies and the Medical Passport for patients. Explore our solutions or request a demo.

Frequently asked questions

What is healthcare interoperability?

It is the ability of different health information systems to exchange data and use it without re-entry: hospital records, laboratories, pharmacies, surveillance systems and health insurers. It rests on shared identifiers, exchange standards, common terminology and data governance.

Why is interoperability a priority for digital health in Africa?

Because many systems already exist but do not communicate. WHO AFRO found that most Member States in the Region lack harmonised digital health standards, and set a 2026 target of 60% of Member States with data standards and interoperability frameworks.

What does IHE certification prove?

It attests that a product's conformity with IHE integration profiles, which specify how established standards such as HL7 and DICOM are used together, has been assessed. Eyone Medical's Yone-Wi engine obtained IHE certification in 2024, a first in Africa; our dedicated article details its scope.

How can a ministry or funder reduce interoperability risk?

By requiring tested conformance to recognised standards in procurement, by setting up a national technical committee on standards as WHO AFRO recommends, and by linking clinical and financing systems from the start. Talk to our team.