Can Digital Health Reduce Inequities? A Scoping Review of Im-plementation Evidence from Low-Resource Settings

This OSF registration documents the methodological protocol and supporting materials for a completed scoping review entitled “Digital Health Interventions for Addressing Health Inequities in Low-Resource Settings: A Scoping Review.” The review aimed to map the available evidence on digital health interventions designed to address health inequities, healthcare access barriers, and service-delivery limitations in low-resource, rural, remote, underserved, and socioeconomically vulnerable settings. The review was structured according to the Population–Concept–Context framework and reported in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). Searches were conducted in Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed using terms related to digital health, telemedicine, telehealth, mobile health, health inequities, underserved populations, and low-resource settings. Eligible studies included empirical and applied research published in English between 2021 and 2026 that examined digital health interventions or digitally supported health services in equity-relevant contexts. The review mapped intervention modalities, target populations, geographical settings, equity-related outcomes, implementation barriers, facilitators, and implications for public health policy and practice. The database searches identified 2612 records. After duplicate removal, screening, retrieval, and full-text eligibility assessment, 69 studies were included in the final synthesis. The review identified interventions involving mHealth applications, telemedicine and telehealth, SMS and voice-based systems, digital platforms, remote monitoring, wearable devices, artificial intelligence-enabled tools, and community health worker-supported models. This registration is retrospective and is intended to provide a transparent, time-stamped record of the review methodology, eligibility criteria, search strategy, study-selection process, data-charting procedures, synthesis approach, and associated supplementary materials. It should not be interpreted as a prospective preregistration completed before the review was conducted.