Building What Lasts
Sustainable digital health infrastructure through institutional capacity, technical governance, and genuine partnership.
Who We Are | How We Work | What We Do | Foundations | It Matters Now | Commitments | Governance
Who We Are
eSHIFT Partner Network is a Swiss not-for-profit organization headquartered in Geneva. Since 2010, we've worked across 80+ projects in more than 30 countries—from national-scale health information systems to enterprise architecture blueprints that guide billions in digital health investment.
We specialise in the work that determines whether digital health investments actually survive: not the technology itself, but the organisational capability to govern, evolve, and sustain it.
Our teams bring decades of combined experience—including years inside WHO, ministries of health, and major implementing partners—alongside TOGAF-certified enterprise architects, ISO-compliant governance specialists, and FHIR implementers who've deployed systems in everything from fragile states to emerging digital economies. We translate lessons from aviation, banking, and telecommunications—sectors that mastered sustainable IT infrastructure decades ago—into the unique challenges of health systems.
You can't buy digital transformation. You have to build it!
How We Work
The Engineering Layer
Between a country's digital health vision and a working system lies crucial territory that most initiatives skip: enterprise architecture, technical governance frameworks, integration standards, and the organizational structures to maintain them.
This "engineering layer" is where sustainability is determined. It's also where we focus.
We don't compete with EMR vendors, DPG providers or system implementers. We build the institutional capacity that makes their work sustainable—the technical leadership, governance frameworks, and vendor management expertise that no procurement contract can deliver.
Realistic Timelines, Honest Partnerships
Digital transformation takes 10-15 years of sustained institutional development—the same horizon as training doctors or building hospitals. We help partners set achievable milestones within that reality.
This means honest conversations about what's actually required, not optimistic timelines designed to fit project cycles.
Capability Transfer as Core Commitment
Every engagement embeds systematic capability transfer: documented architectural decisions, trained local staff, governance structures that institutionalize expertise.
Our goal is to ultimately make ourselves unnecessary. Success means partners can independently evaluate vendors, make architectural decisions, and evolve their systems without us.
What We Do
Strategic Architecture & Blueprinting
Comprehensive digital health blueprints that map business requirements to technical capabilities—from patient workflows to population health surveillance—creating coherent national platforms rather than collections of incompatible point solutions.
Technical Governance Development
Building the organisational foundations for sustainable digital health: health information units with appropriate authority, procurement frameworks that serve country interests, career pathways that attract and retain technical talent.
Implementation with Transfer
Phased deployments that build expertise alongside systems. eSHIFT partners have honed their skills on large scale systems design and deployment both in LMIC contexts and in major OECD countries. We ensure partners develop capacity to maintain, evolve, and govern their infrastructure—not just operate what we installed.
Standards & Interoperability
Deep engagement with international standards ensuring that normative tools like HL7 FHIR are implemented as the engineering instruments they were designed to be—creating genuine interoperability.
Our Foundations
Field-Tested Experience
80+ projects across 30+ countries. Complex political environments. Resource-constrained settings. Conflict zones. National-scale deployments.
We've learned where digital health initiatives succeed—and where they fail. Those lessons shape everything we do.
Cross-Sector Intelligence
Other sectors like aviation, banking, and telecommunications built sustainable IT organizations decades ago.
However, our experience has shown that health systems, especially in emerging economies, are still learning these lessons. We translate proven patterns into health contexts.
Standards Community
Deep partnerships with standards development organizations.
We aim to ensure our work aligns with where health information architecture is heading—and provides honest perspective on what implementation actually requires.
This Matters Now
The global health financing landscape is shifting. Traditional funding sources are becoming less predictable. Systems dependent on perpetual external support face difficult questions when donor priorities change.
The organizations that will thrive are those that invested in genuine institutional capability—internal technical teams, documented governance, vendor independence—rather than systems alone.
eSHIFT and it's combined partner network have been helping countries build exactly these kinds of resilient infrastructure. The work we do today determines which health information systems will still be functioning—and improving—a decade from now.