Leveraging Digital Health Platforms in Developing Countries: The Role of Boundary Resources
The pervasiveness of digital platforms has resulted in the emergence of digital health platforms addressing various health care needs globally. Digital platforms, typically, bring about an international division of labor between platform owners in develop
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Abstract. The pervasiveness of digital platforms has resulted in the emergence of digital health platforms addressing various health care needs globally. Digital platforms, typically, bring about an international division of labor between platform owners in developed countries where they are usually developed and platform consumers in developing countries leveraging them. In this relationship, boundary resources, such as documentation and application programming interfaces, are critical elements in the efforts to leverage digital health platforms in developing countries. This paper uses the case of the digital health platform DHIS2 in Malawi to elucidate and discuss the enabling and restricting roles played by boundary resources towards efforts leveraging digital health platforms in developing countries. Keywords: Digital platforms Digital health platforms Boundary resources Developing countries
1 Introduction In the advent of platformization (Helmond 2015; Nieborg and Poell 2018), digital platforms are permeating into different spheres of modern life. Social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have transformed people’s modes of interaction and sharing experiences. Mobile operating system platforms like Android and iOS have transformed the computing industry leading to an era of computing on the go. In the same vein, mobile payment platforms such as mPesa and Airtel Money are disrupting the financial industry in sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, digital platforms at the heart of the sharing economy, such as Uber and Airbnb have, respectively, transformed the age-old transportation and hotel industries. Consequently, digital platforms have become an omnipresent research phenomena in the information systems (IS) landscape (de Reuver et al. 2018). The term platform is used in diverse ways (Gawer 2009) and platforms can be digital or non-digital (de Reuver et al. 2018). Nevertheless, Baldwin and Woodard (2009), define platforms as modular systems comprising of a set of stable core components and a complementary set of variable peripheral components. Gawer (2009) further elaborates this perspective by stating that all platforms, digital and non-digital, share the same fundamental architecture comprising of a set of core components with © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2019 Published by Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 P. Nielsen and H. C. Kimaro (Eds.): ICT4D 2019, IFIP AICT 551, pp. 116–126, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18400-1_10
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low variety and a complementary set of peripheral components with high variety, and taken together the low variety components are what constitutes the platform. From this underlying perspective of a platform emerges the common understanding of what constitutes a digital platform. In line with this perspective, Tiwana et al. (2010) and later on Tiwana (2013) define a software platform as an extensible software-based system comprising of components and inter
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