Digital Health Landscape

While the Cambodia’s digital healthcare sector was following up with international practices, these attempts were slowed down with multiple structural challenges, including an unclear regulatory environment, outdated and fragmented data systems, limited capacity building, and weak public-private partnerships. Digital health platforms, such as telemedicine, AI-based diagnostics, and electronic medical records played an important role in enabling accessible and high-quality healthcare services.  

Despite these positive developments, the existing regulatory environment is not coping with these technical evolutions. As a result, innovation in the sector has been constrained. Indeed, Cambodia currently lacks mechanisms that would allow new digital health solutions to be tested safely while ensuring patient protection and regulatory oversight.  

At present there is no formal licensing system recognising digital health platforms as distinct category of health service providers. This creates legal uncertainty for platform operators and healthcare professionals, particularly with regard to liability, data protection, and clinical responsibility. From a financing perspective, the exclusion of digital health services from national financing schemes has limited patient access to these platforms and discouraged adoption by healthcare providers.    

Moreover, the lack of a coherent and standardised health information system has prevented healthcare actors form securely sharing data about their patients to an other providers hampering quality services delivery and the continuity of care.  

The development of digital initiatives so far has been constrained by the absence of structured and systematic public-private dialogue. Many digital health initiatives rely on short-term donor funding, which has resulted in fragmented pilot projects and limited national scaling. 

The digital health landscape in the Kingdom has many loopholes which negatively impact the investments. 

Firstly, the lack of a streamlined process for health innovators causes them to lose significant time and financial resources attempting to achieve compliance. This lack of clarity also exposes them to non-compliance risks, which discourages investment in digital health innovation. 

Secondly, the absence of national interoperability standards forces businesses to develop custom information systems and integrations for each individual hospital. This raises costs, creates inefficiencies, and severely limits scalability. 

Thirdly, the exclusion of digital health services from reimbursement schemes, such as the Health Equity Fund and the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), has direct negative consequences for rural and low-income populations, while also disincentivising healthcare professionals from using these services. 

Furthermore, insufficient digital literacy within the health workforce limits capacity building, increases onboarding costs, slows adoption at healthcare facilities, and reduces the overall value that digital health platforms can deliver. 

Finally, the absence of a systematic public-private engagement platform limits the private sector’s ability to contribute expertise, co-create standards, and align innovations with national health priorities.