Rapid Methods to Assess the Potential Impact of Digital Health Interventions, and their Application to Low Resource Settings

Assessing the impact of digital health projects and applications is a key challenge, especially in low resource settings. Full evaluative field studies are resource-intensive and time-consuming. Less demanding approaches that could provide rapid insights would be helpful. This paper presents some "short-cut" approaches for rapid assessments that can provide useful early indications of strengths and weaknesses and can ensure that evaluative efforts are focused on key uncertainties, are not wasted on unpromising interventions, and make the most of what is already known. Three rapid assessment approaches, all underpinned with logic modelling, are presented: Identification of "upstream" obstacles Utilisation of knowledge about "downstream" effects Fermi estimation Their application is illustrated by examples, mainly considering assessment of mobile phone healthcare information applications for citizens and healthcare workers in medium and low-resource settings.