“Achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in Africa: Stronger Together” was the topic of the 3rd Africa Health Business Symposium in Johannesburg, South Africa, Oct. 08 to 09, 2018
Opened by the he Director General of the South African Ministry of Health, Ms Malebona Precious Matsoso, the conference assembled more than 350 participants representing 31 African and 14 countries outside of Africa. Among the delegates were 10 Ministers of Health, Ministry of Health officials, influential health leaders from the continent and global health champions.

Countries in Africa (and globally) aspiring to realise Universal Health Coverage shared knowledge and lessons learned, and explored innovative solutions to meet this challenge.

The final session focused on “The Future of Healthcare: The Digital Promise.” Here, as the closing note of this symposium, Prof. Dr. Karl A. Stroetmann of empirica contributed a Digital Health Vision for Africa entitled “From siloed applications to Digital Health Ecosystems: strengthening health system transformation and UHC in African countries”. To move from national eHealth policies to sustainable digital service provision, he identified four building blocks and explored six core implementation domains mandatory for establishing a successful Digital Health Ecosystem, which should be based on an open platform architecture combined with an open standards national interoperability framework. Download the presentation here.