World Health Organization publishes a facilitation guide for Digital Adaptation Kits

4 November 2026

The World Health Organization has published an implementation facilitation guide for Digital Adaptation Kits. A Digital Adaptation Kit, or DAK, is a foundational layer of the agency's SMART Guidelines approach. It takes clinical guidance written as narrative text and turns it into structured documentation that computer systems can act on, covering the data elements, decision logic and workflows a health programme needs. The kit is deliberately software-neutral, so a country can use it to design or procure any digital system without being tied to one product. The new guide is addressed to health ministries, system developers, digital health implementers and technology partners, and sets out how to run the adaptation process in a country. The point of the SMART Guidelines approach is to shorten the long gap between the issue of a WHO recommendation and its appearance inside the digital tools that health workers actually use.