A hospital can go fully digital and still lose track of you the moment you visit another clinic. That gap sits at the centre of a major new global report.
Black Book Research, a US health technology research firm, released its 2027 State of Global Healthcare Technology: Country Outlooks on October 11. The 340-page guide covers 167 countries, territories and markets, and is free to download with registration. It draws on a 2026 survey of 21,555 verified hospital and health system software users across 147 countries outside the United States.
Three findings stand out for African health systems.
Connection beats installation. The report treats interoperability (shared patient IDs, national registries, e-prescribing and linked records) as the line between installing technology and transforming care. Primary care and community services remain weak spots, even where hospitals are relatively well digitised.
AI rests on the basics. Readiness for artificial intelligence depends on data quality, workflows, governance and security. Without those, AI tools have little to work with.
Sustainability decides survival. Local implementation skills and steady funding increasingly determine whether digital health projects keep running after launch day.
Founder Doug Brown noted that across Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America, advanced systems sit beside settings where connectivity, cost and local support decide what is possible. Treating every adoption gap as a ready market, he warned, is a strategic mistake.
For Nigeria, where many digital health efforts depend on donor or project funding, the message is direct. The real question is not which system to buy, but which one the country can connect, secure and keep running.
Black Book will release country-level vendor rankings in November 2026.
The Health Factor Africa
Get verified health news, free
One email a week: explainers, myth-checks, and the stories behind the headlines.
Work in health policy, government or an NGO? Get the monthly Policy Brief instead.
