Digital Health Literacy—A Prerequisite Competency for the Health Workforce to Improve Health Indicators in Times of COVID: A Case Study from Uttar Pradesh, India

The COVID-19 pandemic and its continuous waves have brought the entire world to a standstill. In response to the Coronavirus, digital technologies across the globe are being harnessed to support public health from identifying new cases, contact tracing, surveilling patients, and evaluation of interventions based on mobility data and communication with the public. Harnessing the use of digital technologies, digital health literacy (DHL) became an indispensable tool for the health workforce including frontline workers to provide primary health services in this pandemic. Having a digitally literate health workforce is an essential element for the success of establishing a health ecosystem. The chapter analyses the case study of Uttar Pradesh, with population size of 200 million (Census of India, 2020) became the first state in India to develop an integrated and unified COVID-19 mobile platform for ensuring that every citizen of the state is tracked, tested, and treated across the continuum of care-bringing together all COVID health facilities, laboratories, state, district, and field staff onto a common platform. To achieve this, the chapter focuses on how digital health literacy has been imparted to 200,000 health officials and frontline workers spread across 75 districts and 59163 village councils of the state. This chapter further measures the complete spectrum of DHL 2.0 skills (Vaart and Drossaert, J Med Internet Res 19: e27, 2017) from searching, selecting, appraising, and applying online health information and healthcare services provided at different healthcare facilities. The chapter aims to establish digital health literacy as a prerequisite requirement for health professionals and workforce for effective delivery of healthcare services specifically in public health sector. The chapter argues that digital health literacy skills are mandatory to ensure how health workforce and practitioners can integrate their knowledge and digital health literacy skills into optimal health behaviour.