Monitoring and Evaluating Digital Health Interventions

This Guide provides step-wise guidance to improve the quality and value of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts in the context of digital health interventions, which are also commonly referred to as mHealth or eHealth interventions. Among the many challenges identified in the digital health landscape, those of programme monitoring and impact evaluation remain areas of ongoing exploration. Digital health interventions are often very dynamic, evolving through several stages of maturity during which the M&E needs of the intervention are also changing rapidly. Digital health intervention projects typically begin with exploring basic questions of whether the intervention addresses the identified needs, including technical functionality and feasibility, followed by assessment of user satisfaction, then move towards efforts to evaluate the effectiveness, attributable impact and, ultimately, “value for money” of the intervention.

The Guide assists the reader to navigate through the development of value “claims”, the selection of indicators and evaluation designs associated with their digital health interventions, as well as approaches for the assessment of the quality and availability of the data from their interventions, and finally, guidelines for the reporting of findings. This progression of activities requires a combination of methods, both qualitative and quantitative, to answer the questions being asked about digital health interventions. Accordingly, this resource directs the reader through a journey that begins with defining the basic technical requirements and continues to early implementation testing and monitoring, through to the evaluation and reporting of intervention impact.