Universal Internet Access Supporting Healthcare Provision: The Example of Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia formulates a particularly interesting example in terms of internet connectivity, accessibility to healthcare services and diseases surveillance, in relation to digitization of healthcare. As an upper-middle-income country, Indonesia introduced universal health care across the country in 2018, and exhibits a highly developed rate of digitization observed. The recent introduction of digital pandemic surveillance and reporting technologies, represents the single-largest introduction of digital technologies within Indonesian healthcare. Significantly, almost all of those technologies resulted from the collaboration of government bodies with private providers at a national and/or subnational scale, along with higher education institutions and research institutions. Therefore, the experiences from Indonesia provide a tangible example for introducing digital healthcare technologies at a national scale, that can be used as a blueprint for other LMIC settings. Furthermore, the integration of these technologies within healthcare demonstrated the potential benefit for digital technologies to inform public health policy at scale and during health emergencies.