TY - JOUR T1 - Establishing Standards to Evaluate the Impact of Integrating Digital Health into Health Systems JF - Global Health: Science and Practice JO - GLOB HEALTH SCI PRACT SP - S5 LP - S17 DO - 10.9745/GHSP-D-18-00230 VL - 6 IS - Supplement 1 AU - Alain Labrique AU - Lavanya Vasudevan AU - William Weiss AU - Kate Wilson Y1 - 2018/10/10 UR - http://www.ghspjournal.org/content/6/Supplement_1/S5.abstract N2 - The key milestones in the rise of digital health illustrate efforts to bridge gaps in the evidence base, a shifting focus to scale-up and sustainability, growing attention to the precise costing of these strategies, and an emergent implementation science agenda that better characterizes the ecosystem—the social, political, economic, legal, and ethical context that supports digital health implementation—necessary to take digital health approaches to scale.The rapid and global growth of mobile phone use in the last decade has enabled health system and development innovators to leverage digital health strategies in low-resource settings to alleviate persistent health system challenges. From supply chain management to frontline health-worker training, digital strategies have demonstrated varying degrees of promise. Despite the pervasiveness of these digital innovations, there has been rampant criticism of limited evidence to support their effectiveness.1 Numerous systematic reviews have been conducted with the same conclusion—the available evidence is of low-to-moderate quality and rigorous methodologies are needed to evaluate digital health strategies in low-resource settings.2 Despite this evidence deficit, global stakeholders' interest in implementing and scaling digital health strategies in these settings remains strong.3,4 In this commentary, we summarize the key milestones in the rise of digital health, illustrating efforts to bridge gaps in the evidence base, a shifting focus to scale-up and sustainability, growing attention to the precise costing of these strategies, and an emergent implementation science agenda to better characterize the necessary ecosystem of scale—the social, political, economic, legal, and ethical context that supports digital health implementation.5 We also identify key remaining gaps in the evaluation of digital health interventions to support their integration into health systems at scale.In the early years of the mobile phone revolution, between about 2005 and 2010, the digital-health landscape was populated by numerous small-scale demonstration and pilot projects … ER -