Against a backdrop of 20 competing delegations from across the Latin American and Caribbean region, the Dominican Republic has secured a spot among the top six performers at the 5th Regional Digital Health Connectathon, held in Panama City. The high-profile regional event, organized alongside the PH4H 2026 Regional Conference, was designed to test national health systems’ capacity to share clinical data safely and efficiently in line with global interoperability norms.
Unlike conventional conferences that focus only on policy discussion, the Connectathon puts technical teams through hands-on, real-world scenario testing to evaluate cross-border health information exchange. Dominican technical delegations achieved a perfect 100% completion rate for all assigned test cases, a result that cemented its standing as one of the region’s top-performing participants in this exercise.
Testing was centered on five high-priority domains critical to modern cross-border digital health: the International Patient Summary (IPS), cross-border telehealth consultations, electronic yellow fever vaccination certificates, electronic medication prescriptions, and health data cybersecurity frameworks. The Dominican team successfully demonstrated proficiency across every testing area: it proved capable of producing and sharing standardized patient clinical summaries, authenticating digital vaccination certificates, processing cross-border telemedicine requests, retrieving accurate medication data, and deploying core security tools including digital signatures and QR codes to safeguard sensitive patient health information.
According to the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Public Health, this strong performance marks a meaningful milestone in the rollout of the country’s National Digital Health Strategy. It also paves the way for the planned implementation of the Single Electronic Health Record (known locally as EEUS), a transformative system that will grant authorized medical providers secure access to a patient’s full clinical history, regardless of where the original care and data collection took place. This achievement positions the Dominican Republic as a growing leader in regional digital health integration, bringing it closer to a fully connected, patient-centered national health ecosystem.