Across East Africa, mobile phones and tablets are increasingly sitting in the hands of community health workers, clinicians, managers and patients. They are being used for a widening range of functions from diagnostics to health insurance to treatment advice, generating hopes for new healthcare futures and establishing the region as an emerging hub of experimentation in digital health. Drawing on our on-going ethnographic and anthropological research in Kenya and Tanzania, this article explores the dynamic, varied, experimental, and increasingly financialised terrain of formal digital health projects. While innovation in digital health is a growing feature of healthcare across the globe, in East Africa it is entering into a region already long characterised by NGOised, fragmented and vertical healthcare systems and heavy dependence on foreign capital. This presents challenges to efforts, including the WHO’s Universal Health Coverage agenda, to foster national and equitable public healthcare systems. In exploring these issues, we recognise the power, and often deleterious effects, of financial capital that foregrounds markets in global digital health, but we also open space for a (still critical) recognition of East African-led digital and data technology movements.

中文翻译：

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东非的数字健康：创新、实验和市场

在整个东非，移动电话和平板电脑越来越多地掌握在社区卫生工作者、临床医生、管理人员和患者手中。它们被用于从诊断到健康保险再到治疗建议的广泛功能，为新的医疗保健未来带来希望，并将该地区建立为新兴的数字健康试验中心。借鉴我们在肯尼亚和坦桑尼亚正在进行的民族志和人类学研究，本文探讨了正式数字健康项目的动态、多样、实验性和日益金融化的领域。虽然数字健康的创新是全球医疗保健的一个日益增长的特征，但在东非，它正在进入一个长期以来以非政府组织、分散和垂直的医疗保健系统以及对外国资本的严重依赖。这对包括世界卫生组织的全民健康覆盖议程在内的努力提出了挑战，以促进国家和公平的公共医疗保健系统。在探讨这些问题时，我们认识到金融资本在全球数字健康市场中的力量和有害影响，但我们也为（仍然至关重要的）承认东非领导的数字和数据技术运动开辟了空间。