Area / System factor	Purpose	Description
Engagement in care	Patient engagement in their safety	“Digitalisation can be very good for auditing provider behaviour for quality improvement and this digitalisation can be used by patient groups to assay whether or not they’re getting patient care from providers.” [ID 5] “If you go to Khana health centre, most people will be women in a war zone and usually with babies and often old. The older women say that people don't see them, and they're forgotten. Making it so that the option for accountability and assurance that your interests [as a patient] are going to be served is increased as a result of having some sort of device, even being able to send text messages, would make a huge difference.” [ID 5]
	Raising awareness	“With more expertise in digital technology, we could have done more on this side, particularly using social media to raise awareness and to monitor rumours associated with Ebola.” [ID 3] “Mental health is a huge issue which is going to be recognised, particularly in conflict zones, as you have PTSD seen now as fairly important aspect of overall health. There’s a lot that can and needs to be done on mental health, because people of different levels of training can be helpful in that context, community health workers can be leveraged to recognise symptoms. [There is an] alarmingly high incidence of PTSD in conflict zones.” [ID 1]
Continuity of care	Patient information	“What really matters is making certain that as much as possible of the chronicle of a person's disease and therapeutic approach is in the hands of the person rather than in the hands of the provider. If there's a case of patient retained medical records, it's in settings of adversity.” [ID 5] “For the mobile populations, digital identity is key for importance of protection. [It is important to] make sure people can have access to service. I have seen in the Syrian crisis where having such information is important [because] people [are] crossing the border without documentation. There should be a way of [using] digital tools to enable refugees to access services including employment.” [ID 2] “It would be helpful to have a way of records being retained by the person in a form they can access, but also on behalf of that person, on a cloud that others can access that is still somehow controllable for the patient...The ideal is [to have] records with the patient, accessed by the patient, that they can read and understand. This means there's capacity for reasonable continuity.” [ID 5] “In India, the Aadhaar ID system is a fundamentally helpful way of tracking medical records.” [ID 1] “Mobile [phones] can also be seen as a health passport, which is a digital thing, not a physical thing. You could develop it to monitor stuff in blood, in saliva, in areas that might be infected, to check whether you're fertile, etc.” [ID 5]
	Digital identity	“The challenge is identity, whether person has one. In India, they have digital identity based on I think fingerprint, but [they] may start introducing based on retina.” [ID 5] “Technologies to identify individuals can help to develop centralised missing persons board.” [ID 6]
Workforce operations	Training, simulation and distance learning	“In terms of health workers training and quality service, in many areas, especially sub-Saharan Africa, health workers don’t have good training. There are few learning opportunities. Small investments like tablet-based learning weekly in a clinic, would have huge impact, but there’s not much available.” [ID 2] “[We] tried distance learning for health workers in a refugee camp through a partnership with a university in Geneva that developed online learning platform so that when refugees go back to Somalia, they have transferrable European credit. [This can be] used to gain employment when they go back...The uptake is quite good.” [ID 2]
	Protection of workers	“How do we track our own staff, in areas subject to hostage taking in the past? [We] implemented Scan app, GPS system with live dashboard.” [ID 3] “[In the case of] Ebola, it was difficult to get healthcare experts into country because of security. [We] don’t want to put more people at immediate risk, [so there was a] conundrum of trying to get many people with expertise... [Through an] online support system via video conference, experts [were] able to support physicians on site. Extremely interesting and done in real time.” [ID 3] “Using the Ebola experimental vaccine, 44,000 people were vaccinated as part of research trial. [Using a] cloud-based system to monitor for adverse events, with all information sent to the cloud, people across world [were] analysing data in real time.” [ID 3]
Data collection	Data capture	“[There are] issues around the way we capture data related to outbreaks in infectious diseases. The surveillance system captures data from around the world, [with] around 7,000 signals of public health threats every month, whittled down to 600 more serious threats, then using machine learning and AI techniques to reduce down to 300. Then, humans cut that down to 30 that we will investigate. Most commonly, it’s infectious disease outbreaks like Ebola or other pathogenic outbreaks. It would be helpful to improve these systems using AI, [because] it’s heavily reliant on manual expertise at the moment.” [ID 3] “Adoption of standards for information sharing is key where the use of standards allows you to share information in a crisis.” [ID 6]
	Supply chain forecasting	"Another area where I see biggest need is supply chain in conflict settings. Health facilities [are] dependent on humanitarian funding, with no capacity for planning tools/forecasting. We cannot plan for when we will run out of medicine, and it can take some time to deliver. A tool for forecasting and planning would be very valuable for being able to track stock movements.” [ID 2]