ICT Transformation in Healthcare: A Risk-Based Approach for Climate Adaptation in Low and Middle-Income Countries

Climate change is putting pressure on and exacerbating existing stressors and increasing demand for healthcare services. LMICs face a variety of healthcare challenges, the most common of which are caused by systemic and financial limitations, difficulties implementing digital services, problems with outdated technological infrastructure, inadequacy among legislators and healthcare service providers; lack of skills and competence among healthcare professionals; and a lack of information technology upgrades for digital initiatives that have attempted to guarantee the consistent implementation of these services. The paper identifies shortcomings and possibilities in the healthcare systems. However, these projects have been studied on a small scale, making it difficult to determine investment. To achieve scale and sustainability, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and healthcare programs require knowledge-based policies and a strategic business environment that includes all important public and private stakeholders to speed up climate change preventive and response efforts. The literature highlights the necessity of conducting systematic evaluations with an emphasis on health information systems (HIS) to pinpoint the underlying causes and gaps influencing performance. To address issues with the health system and health professionals' abilities to use information and ICT, this article highlights the necessity of a risk management framework that expedites the ICT revolution in healthcare. The paper proposes risk management as one of the most important aspects of ICT for healthcare implementation, as well as approaches for comprehensively assessing healthcare system integration to ICT and identifying the root causes of adverse events to make healthcare more resilient to emerging global health threats.