Collaboration in eHealth development: The power of cross-organizational communication

This presentation will demonstrate the effectiveness of eHealth communication through GHDonline.org, a virtual professional community platform where members engage in collaborative problem-solving and share information across institutional and organizational boundaries in order to increase knowledge access and transparency. Developers of eHealth technologies must connect to their users, the implementers, to identify needs and build technologies suited to those needs. Implementers must understand and make decisions about the myriad technologies available to them. Policymakers and funders need a full view of the landscape of eHealth technologies in order to ensure that the products being developed and implemented integrate into the overall design of a health system, whether at a regional or national level. These diverse stakeholders in eHealth require collective and cross-organizational input to test new product ideas, design, and application. The GHDonline Health IT community has brought these participants together, from 430 organizations across 90 countries, to discuss and share best practices about the feasibility, planning, and implementation of health information technologies. Drawing on discussions from the Health IT community, this presentation will illustrate the value of collaboration between members from different organizations and countries. Discussions on topics that range from the use of mobile devices for stopping stockouts to clinic-management software have proven the effectiveness of knowledge dissemination across organizational and national boundaries.