A Digital Health Investment Taxonomy

Digital health funding is a powerful catalytic investment to accelerate progress towards universal health coverage (UHC). The challenge is ensuring these resources are directed strategically, aligned with national strategies, coordinated across stakeholders, and tracked in ways that enable transparency, accountability and learning. Without a shared classification system for investments across the various funders in the digital health and AI ecosystem – including governments, development partners, donors and private sector – this is difficult; investments remain invisible, gaps go unidentified, fragmentation and duplication persist, and accountability is hard to maintain.

The 2024 G20 Health Ministers Declaration called for improved tracking of digital health investments. During the G20 Health Working Group meeting, key digital health partners agreed to strengthen coordination, including developing tools that can help track digital health expenditure.

In response to this, a Digital Health Investment Taxonomy has been developed to provide a common framework for categorising and tracking digital health and AI investments across stakeholders and funding sources. It is designed to strengthen budgeting, planning, and coordination; enable development partners and private sector actors to better align their portfolios and coordinate efforts; and for standardised reporting within existing financial tracking and monitoring frameworks. This work is being led by Transform Health, with guidance and inputs from a leadership steering committee including: Global Fund, OECD, UNICEF, WHO, and World Bank. It has been developed through an extensive landscape scoping review, expert and stakeholder guidance, and validated through a public consultation period and ongoing stakeholder testing.

The aim of this session is to present the Digital Health Investment Taxonomy and to build support for its use as a tool to support digital health investment planning and coordination (and of its formal launch later this year).

The objectives of the session are to:

• Socialise and build support for the Digital Health Investment Taxonomy, including presenting its purpose, how it was developed, and how it can be used by governments, development partners, private sector and technical stakeholders to support digital health investment budgeting, planning, tracking and coordination.
• Hear from diverse funders in the digital health ecosystem – including governments, donors, multilateral organisations, and private sector – on the need for improved transparency and tracking of digital health investments and the role of the Taxonomy in supporting this.