Draft:WHO Smart Guidelines

WHO Smart Guidelines are an approach to systematize and accelerate consistent application of evidence based recommendations leveraging digital technologies. The acronym SMART stands for Standards-based, Machine-readable, Adaptive, Requirements-based, and Testable. . Guidelines published in this manner can promote adaptation and uptake while preserving fidelity of the evidence

Background
WHO publishes numerous health guidelines with Despite making available recommendations with rigor, WHO observed several shortcomings in their uptake.
 * Challenges in interpretation and adaptation to local context
 * Challenges in incorporating recommendations into digital systems
 * Challenges to replicability of successfully deployed digital systems

These challenges contribute to delayed adoption of guidelines and recommendations, potentially taking many years until full adoption. The WHO SMART Guidelines address these issues by providing a systematic, transparent, and testable structure for countries to work through. They are software-neutral, meaning they can be adapted into whichever software platform a country has elected to use. This makes the guidelines more efficient and accurate to adopt, leading to stronger, more sustainable health information systems.

Components
These guidelines are a set of reusable digital health components organized in a five-step pathway to advance the adoption of best clinical and data practices. They inform guideline developers on how to translate recommendations into specifications and standards, integrate recommendations into updatable digital systems, to localize, make interoperable, institutionalize, consistent with evidence-based recommendations.