In December 2025, I had the opportunity to provide the closing remarks at an event bringing together fellow members of the Transform Health Coalition and other ecosystem partners to examine the digital transformation of community health.
The event was held in Nairobi, Kenya, shortly before the launch of Transform Health’s #Roadmapto2030—a bold, five-year action agenda to accelerate digital transformation of health systems and progress universal health coverage (UHC) by the end of the decade.
Leaders across governments, multilateral agencies, civil society, youth groups, private sector, and other stakeholders—including Medic—shaped the roadmap.
Despite the diversity of experience and sectors represented, a resounding message rang clear: digital transformation is no longer optional. It is a core enabler of UHC. And it must go hand-in-hand with political will, trust, and coordinated action.
What emerged from the rich discussions at December’s event was more than a set of technical insights. It was the beginning of a shared political, social, and architectural understanding of what it will actually take to transform community health at scale.
Here’s what we learned:
1. Community health is not the last mile of the health system.
It is the first step, the human in the loop. The moment of care. It is where trust lives, information flows, families make decisions, and equity is either delivered or denied.
If we’re serious about UHC, this is where the system must start, not where it ends.
2. Digital transformation is not about devices or apps.
It is about building the policy, regulatory, social, and technical conditions that allow communities, health workers, governments, and partners to work as one system.
This requires the intentional design of a whole-of-enterprise information architecture—not more parallel solutions, not more pilots, and not more fragmentation disguised as innovation.
In the larger field of digital health we have known this for a long time and seen it continuously reinforced, and spending time thinking about what it looks like in the specific context of community health was invigorating and inspiring.
3. Community voices must move from token presence to structural power.
Community health workers, Community Health Assistants, supervisors, county teams—and the communities they serve—can and must shape how systems evolve.
If their voices do not drive the design, then we are building systems for them instead of with them, and those systems will never be sustainable.
4. Governments must lead, and partners must be ready.
Several countries are already moving quickly; Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Uganda, and many more among them. When political leadership decides to prioritize community health, the system accelerates fast.
Our responsibility as partners accompanying them on that journey is to be ready with the strategies, standards, evidence, and architectures that make that acceleration successful and safe.
5. This is a moment for collective action, not competition.
One of the most powerful themes was the call to map the ecosystem, learn from each other’s work, and build a shared investment case.
If we want to convince funders — domestic and global — to back this agenda, we must tell a coherent story, rooted in evidence, centered on people, and delivered with one voice.
6. This work matters because it moves power.
From capital cities to counties, institutions to communities, fragmented systems to integrated ones. And from reactive care to proactive well-being.
Power, leadership and decision-making needs to be collaborative, inclusive, and closer to the contexts that shape our work. As the challenges and opportunities in digital health become increasingly complex, we need to amplify the voices of leaders who can work side by side to collectively drive innovation and ensure that community health technology is truly built together.
If we can build the enabling environment we envision—the policies, the financing pathways, the standards, the architecture, and the mechanisms for community voice—then we will have created something that can be adapted and adopted far beyond any one country.
We are not here to design another project. We are here to shape a generation-defining framework for community health in the digital age. Medic and our community stand ready to walk this path with Transform Health partners collaboratively, intentionally, and with deep respect for the communities at the center of it all.