Digital Health as an Enabler of Personalized Medicine in Ghana: Gaps, Opportunities, and Future Directions

Digital health solutions and personalized medicine are increasingly promoted as pathways to improve health care delivery in low-resource settings, including Ghana. Drawing on insights from our examination of the published literature and our engagement with digital health research in this context, we present a scholarly viewpoint on how digital health has been positioned in relation to personalized medicine in Ghana, where progress has been uneven and largely oriented toward population-level interventions. We observe that most digital health initiatives in Ghana focus on mobile health apps and health information systems that support service delivery and access, with limited translation toward truly personalized models of care. Although personalized medicine is frequently discussed as a future goal, it remains weakly operationalized in practice, and approaches such as N-of-1 trials-often cited as exemplars of individualized care-are notably absent from the existing literature. Importantly, the limited uptake of personalized approaches does not reflect a lack of relevance in Ghana, but rather the constraints of population-level digital health strategies that, while essential, have shown limited capacity to address individual heterogeneity in treatment responses, adherence, and long-term outcomes. We argue that this absence reflects structural, methodological, and policy-related challenges. At the same time, emerging digital health infrastructure, policy interest, and research capacity present opportunities to reposition digital health as an enabler of personalized medicine. Helping many single individuals through scalable digital personalized approaches may be a valuable innovative approach to public health. This viewpoint articulates key gaps, contextual constraints, and future directions, with the aim of informing researchers, policymakers, and implementers seeking to advance personalized, data-driven care in Ghana and comparable settings.