Three pillars for digital health assessment in LMICs: a mini review of technology benchmarking, digital health literacy, and social media listening.

Digital health has emerged as a critical component of healthcare delivery in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), offering opportunities to strengthen access, monitoring, and engagement across diverse populations. However, existing evaluations often focus narrowly on technological functionality while overlooking broader contextual factors such as digital literacy and public discourse. This mini-review proposes an integrative framework for digital health assessment built around three complementary pillars: technology benchmarking, digital health literacy, and social media listening. A structured literature search of PubMed, supplemented by Web of Science, was conducted to identify representative studies published between 2020 and 2026 relevant to digital health implementation in LMICs. Fifteen studies were selected to provide illustrative evidence across the three domains. The proposed framework highlights the need for multidimensional evaluation approaches that move beyond conventional app-based metrics. While broadly applicable across healthcare sectors, the framework offers particular relevance for population groups requiring sustained engagement, including maternal, child, and adolescent health contexts. This review contributes a practical conceptual model for researchers, policymakers, and developers seeking to strengthen digital health strategies in resource-constrained settings.