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Agriculture, Health, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Tobacco control and mHealth

A decade ago, around half of the people in the world’s richest countries had a mobile phone. Mobile penetration in Africa was under 2%. Today there are more than 5.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions globally. Penetration in a number of African countries is now over 40%. More than half of households in majority of developing countries including in rural areas – have a mobile phone. Despite the vast outreach of this technology, the potential has not been fully tapped by the public health or tobacco control community.This is due to a number of reasons, the most notable being an absence of well documented studies/demonstration projects to show the population wide impact in a cost effective and sustainable fashion.

For the last six months WHO has been researching the mhealth tobacco control market and looking for possibilities to leverage m health and tobacco control. The challenge we see are few studies or projects that are currently using mobile phones and tobacco.

The few studies we have found have focused on sms for cessation in developed countries but the results are impressive. From the sms cessation projects in the UK, New Zealand and now the US, we see that using sms for cessation is highly effective. As we know, the spread of tobacco use is moving to the developing world and we could have the same impact in developing countries.

Of course it is not just about individual smoking behaviour and cessation. Our research and outreach has pointed to the possibility of using mobiles for individuals to access quit services, raise awareness and communicate about the dangers of smoking. Mobile networks can give WHO and our partners access to the largest market in the world, this is very important for anti smoking messages which can have a far greater reach than through TV, print or other media campaigns. Mobile phones can be used as a geotagging mechanisms to provide advice on smoke free places and to improve compliance of smoke free laws, to provide a platform for social networking, gaming and competition, and to monitor and collect data on the tobacco epidemic.

With approximately 6 million tobacco attributable deaths very year it is critical that we move quickly, leveraging technology such as mhealth, to build awareness, improve enforcement/compliance of tobacco control laws and to help existing tobacco users to quit.

As the space for tobacco control and mHealth is relatively empty we have a unique opportunity to bring together tobacco control and mHealth players to develop successful interventions that can be used both by developed and developing countries in their tobacco control work. WHO is looking to engage with interested organizations and foundations to partner with us such as mobile associations, telcos, academics, application developers, foundations etc.This is a public health intervention where there is an opportunity for you to develop appropriate public-private partnerships with governments.

We hope that we can connect through this HUB – form new partnerships, share lessons learnt and best practices, validate what works and what doesn’t, monitor existing projects and create new ones, and spread the word on effective mhealth solutions for tobacco. Eventually we plan to create a matrix of population wide cost effective solutions for our member states detailing the top mHealth solutions for tobacco control.

Image credit: Matthias Weinberger (Flickr)

September 21, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Technology’s Role in Self-managed Diseases

Closeup of a digital blood glucose meter reading

As a person living with type 1 diabetes, technology has been a medical part of my daily life for more than ten years. Diabetes is largely a self-managed disease, meaning that the person living with diabetes must manage the day-to-day balance between severe short-term effects and equally severe long-term effects. Technology can be a great help in this – in the last ten years I’ve tried at least about ten different types of blood glucose meters, four different insulin pumps, and I am always wearing a continuous glucose monitor.

I’ve also tried some of the mobile apps available to assist with diabetes management – tracking blood glucose levels, calculating carbohydrate and the amount of insulin to take with each meal, recording exercise events and so much more. I know I’m not the only one who has tried these devices; when technology plays a part in your own chronic disease management, you tend to incorporate technology from non-medical devices as well.

It should be no surprise to me, then, that a popular Twitter Chat group organized as Diabetes Social Media Advocates, or #dsma, recently devoted an entire hour-long discussion to the topic of mHealth earlier this month. Questions ranged from “What would you like your mobile device to help you with managing your diabetes?” to “What are your thoughts on the FDA regulating mobile apps that uses platforms for medical device functions?”

The answers were all over the place – some people weren’t interested in using their mobile phones for anything but making calls and receiving email, others wanted to see all of their devices, including medical devices and mobile phones, have the ability to communicate with one another. One person even said that he’d love a phone that could take a picture of a meal and estimate the amount of carbohydrate for you. Initially he was joking, but someone quickly told him that that function is in development, although struggling with accuracy right now.

Of all the topics and crazy ideas that came up, only one question received consensus: “Does mHealth have the potential to change the way we take care of our health or manage diabetes?” Everyone answered yes. But these are all smartphone-owning, diabetes-tweeting, tech-savvy folks. What about the rest of the 346 million people with diabetes around the world?

A quick check at the HUB Database will show you that 15 technologies, programs, and organizations have contributed to the database and tagged diabetes. Some focus on medication reminders, others provide vital information to health care workers. One program even developed a game-like system that monitors interaction with a virtual pet to let friends or relatives know that the person is active – allowing more opportunity for an independent lifestyle.

This is one of the great aspects of mHeatlh: it focuses on the health problems and identifies innovative solutions. Not remembering to take your meds? Your phone can help! Not checking in with your loved ones despite the fact you could fall into a coma? Your digital pet can help! In this day and age, when 70% of mobile phone subscriptions are in developing countries, phones can be seen as health tools – especially for those of us with self-managed diseases.

September 20, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Health, Non-communicable Diseases, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Beyond “an App for that”: Using mHealth to fight NCDs

As the global health community gears up for the upcoming United Nations High-Level Summit on non-communicable disease (NCDs), I thought it would be useful to explore the ways in which mobile technology can play a role in the efforts to reduce the burden of NCDs globally. NCDs include cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and chronic respiratory diseases. The combined impact of these diseases contributes substantially to global poverty rates and places strain on healthcare systems worldwide.

With a growing urban population and lifestyle changes, particularly in diets where fast foods have become a greater part of the local diet, obesity and diabetes rates tend to grow rapidly. NCD rates are frequently driven by the combination of lifestyle changes and environmental shifts and require more innovative thinking around behavioral change and social movements in order to make long-term changes.

mHealth applications for NCDs are already quite common in parts of the world where diabetes rates, in particular, are high. This can be found in personalize-able mobile applications such as Glucose Buddy, or in social media campaigns such as TuAnalyze, which uses Twitter to drive higher compliance rates for hemoglobin A1c testing (a bit of a gold-standard when it comes to diabetes care).

Beyond diabetes, there are NCD prevention applications, such as the anti-smoking Text2Quit, demonstrating the potential to find interventions with the capacity to scale into national campaigns. On the respiratory disease front, Asthmapolis, is an innovative approach that combines sensors with mapping to track the contexts in which people with asthma use their inhalers and furthers our public health understanding of asthma and the environment. Tracking programs that enable dieters to monitor food intake and exercise can be effective tools for fighting obesity and cardio-vascular disease.

In order to realize the full potential of mobiles, however, we should take a few cues from the recent mass mobilizations and social movements in the Middle East where Facebook and Twitter were utilized to facilitate social change movements in Egypt and Tunisia.

Similarly, long-term efforts at prevention in public health have rarely succeeded without complementary sustained social movements that reduce the social barriers to behavioral change and create stronger enabling environments for personal lifestyle changes to succeed. This could include more walkable cities, better access to health foods, and changing environmental drivers that affect cardiovascular diseases and respiratory health outcomes.

We’ll likely need to move beyond the “app for that” ethos to engaging with social networks and technology in ways that can promote both well-being and the underlying social transformations required to sustain behavioral change in a health landscape that must navigate a long-term global financial crisis where resources are in short supply.

September 20, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

How to convey the new WHO Mental Health Intervention Guide to workers in the field?

On paper? Online? On smartphone apps? Via SMS or voice?

This 89 pages mhGAP-IG is issued in 2010 and now available in several languages. The guide consists of decision trees for the most important psychiatric conditions.

1. Use of paper versions:

Reading: Additional shipping and transport costs can be a hurdle in low and middle income countries (LMIC). One can download the guide from the WHO website, but then one faces the high costs of (color) print and copies.

Training: Face2face trainings seem the most ideal option, but the in most LMIC there is a shortage of health tutors. And a face2face training necessitates the movement of the health worker away from the field, which interrupts the delivery of services and is expensive.

2. With the internet/desktop/laptop:

Reading: Distribution on CDs is cheap. Online reading offers also the use of go-to tabs, notes storage, information charts and a find-utility. The main disadvantages of internet/computer is the constant need of a computer nearby and standby, which is a rarity in most LMIC.

Training: Beside the benefits of no travel and no interruption of the daily work, the internet gives health workers also the opportunity to study on own pace and preferred time.

3. With mobile apps on smartphones:

Reading: Smartphones can have a high added value for previously unconnected people. Smartphone prizes drop and they are growing in popularity in LMIC. The guide can be read on an app.

Training: Education via a smartphone apps offers the same benefits as the internet learning, like nice attractive tools and designs. The extra advantages are the pocket format; easy taking it with you.

4. With mobile phones (no wireless internet):

Reading: Service in developing countries will rely heavily on text messaging and voice in the years ahead. One can convey parts of the guide by SMS or voice, piece by piece, or certain parts on request. One can even run an automated SMS reply manager.

Training: Conducting a training in the mhGAP-IG solely by mobile phones is possible, but only an option of one really can’t reach the health worker via another channel.

Conclusions and recommendations:

-Not one of the 4 distribution channels is the best of all, so create materials in all 4

-Concert international and implement what’s most suitable on a local level

-Connect and cooperate with innovators in LMIC

-Look for creative funding channels, including NGOs and telecom providers

-Learn, lend and copy from other health fields, which are a long way ahead in technical innovations.

Full article with links and examples on the in2mentalhealth website

September 20, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

WHO releases 2011 Compendium of New and Emerging Health Technologies

The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a compendium of innovative technologies that may address global health complexities and improve health outcomes in low-resource settings. It presents a snapshot of technologies, either under development or commercialized, that address specific health problems and offer proposed solutions. Each technology is featured in a one-pager which showcases the product functionality and specifications, developer’s claims of product benefits, usage information, development stage, as well as future work and challenges for the product. According to the WHO, the compendium 2011 aims to raise awareness of the critical need for development and dissemination of novel technology in developing countries.

Technology Under Development…

Assisted vaginal delivery instrument
Blood collection drape estimating postpartum blood loss
Fetal heart rate monitor by mobile phone
Infant warmer
Isolator system for laparoscopic surgery
Lab-in-a-backpack: point of care screening/diagnostic
Low-technology child restraint car seat
Microbial water testing kit
Mobile health record system for pediatric HIV
Mobile phone image transmission for diagnosis
Mobile phone pulse oximeter
Off-grid refrigerator
Orthopaedic external fixator
Pedograph
Point-of-use water purifier
Portable cell sorting and counting device
Portable system for pre-cancer screening at point of care
Portable telemedicine unit
Portable transcutaneous haemoglobin meter
Single-size contraceptive diaphragm
Subcutaneous drug delivery device
Woman’s condom

Commercialized Technology…

Birthing simulator for training
Fetal heart rate monitor
Isothermal nucleic acid amplifi cation system for POC diagnosis
Manual wheelchairs and mobility devices
Medical data communication system
Mobile technology to connect patients to remote doctors
Newborn simulator for resuscitation training
Non-pneumatic anti-shock garment
Oxytocin in prefilled auto-disable injection system
Parasitological test system
Phototherapy for neonatal jaundice treatment
Point-of-use water disinfection system
Portable haemoglobin meter
Portable ventilator
Prefi lled auto-disable injection system
Reusable neonatal suction device
Self-powered pulse oximeter
Solar thermal cooking and autoclave device
Transcutaneous bilirubin measurement system for infants
Treatment response software application
Ventilator using continuous positive airway pressure
Water filter

September 12, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Gamification: The future of mHealth?

Photo Credit: mashable.com

A report that was released at the end of July highlighted the emergence of gamification in mobile services, especially in mHealth. In the report, the term gamification is defined as “the use of gameplay mechanics for non-game applications. The term also suggests the process of using game thinking to solve problems and engage audiences.”

Therefore, in the realm of healthcare, gamification refers to the use of game mechanics or game principles in mHealth applications. In some mHealth circles, a sub field has emerged call health games, which are games that are intended to improve the health of the users. The report suggests that gamification is the future of mobile, web and social media technology.

These gaming apps are designed to alleviate health burdens by promoting healthy behaviors and actions, and educating users on the nature of the burden itself.

For instance, there could be a gaming app on the importance of having an insecticide treated bed net for malaria prevention. The app could educate the user on how malaria is contracted and how to treat it by presenting a series of questions to answer for a prize.

At its most basic level, these apps can reward the user with virtual or actual incentives as they complete certain actions that attenuate a health burden. The incentive encourages the user to perform the action.

A recent Gartner report predicts that by 2015, more than 50% of organizations will gamify their innovation processes. “By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon, and more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application,” says the report.

SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch agrees. “It feels like the next natural evolution of human-technological interaction to me,” he says. As we complete the social layer, we’ll begin construction in earnest on the game layer.”

In the realm of health, gaming apps can be used as tools to encourage a diet plan, educate about a disease, promote drug adherence, and present treatment options. According to experts, one indirect result is that along with promoting certain actions towards improving health, the games may also generate positive attitudes and improve emotional states towards achieving better health.

Photo Credit: texttochange.org

In the developing world, one such app exists called Freedom HIV/AIDS that was implemented in India and Africa. Designed to promote HIV/AIDS awareness, the app offers games themed for its location. For instance, in India, safety cricket, and Quiz with Babu were just some of the games through which HIV/AIDS awareness was promoted.

Text to Change(TTC) is another mobile service that offers gaming apps to its participants. Implemented in Africa, TTC offers quiz games that educate participants about different health burdens. In the end of the quizzes, incentives are provided to the participants. TTC’s services have been popular with UNICEF, WHO, UN and USAID initiatives.

The games are a great way to engage people with health campaigns that may otherwise be neglected due to lack of social interaction. Another report says that gaming apps can help overcome the guilt associating with failing to complete a health program. The report says, “ Games help patients manage that guilt. The game navigates patients through their story of successes and failures until they ultimately become victorious.”

If this is one of the roads that will be embarked by mHealth apps, and mobile apps as a whole, at least it will be a fun one. After all, when was the last time anyone had fun learning about HIV/AIDS or vaccinations?

August 9, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Health, Health Systems, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

MediBabble: A free tool no health professional should be without

Dr. Brad Cohn (left) and Dr. Alex Blau (right) Photo Credit: ucsf.edu

An Apple app was released earlier this summer that translates medical history questions from English into other languages. The app, called MediBabble, was designed by doctors Alex Blau and Brad Cohn, a duo of physicians from San Francisco.

The idea for the app sprouted from a 2 a.m. conversation while the two were still in medical school. The conversation stemmed from frustrations over not being able to understand patients that did not speak English, and not having an immediate translating tool to help them out.

“Ninety percent of diagnoses come from the patient’s self-reported medical history, so the ability to communicate is critical,” Blau said. “Time is not an asset doctors or patients have. You need that information when you need it.”

MediBabble is currently being distributed for free on Apple’s iTunes, and has more than 8,000 downloads to date. The app has been lauded by several mHealth entities and has even won a few awards for its benefits to the medical world.

MediBabble was designed for Apple products with touch-screen software, such as the iPhone or iPad. The app allows health care providers to play medical history questions and instructions out loud, so far in five languages, to patients that don’t understand English. Currently, the available languages are Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian and Haitian Creole.

The questions range from basic examination questions such as “Can you tell me your name?” to more specific inquiries like, “Do you get recurring lung infections?” The app has more than 2,500 exam questions in its arsenal to translate.

Photo Credit: itunes.apple.com

MediBabble’s interface is structured on a symptom-based approach already commonly used by medical practitioners worldwide. It starts by gathering information about the current complaint and then proceeds into social, family and medication histories; and a review of systems; all for over sixty common chief complaints across eleven organ systems.

According to Blau and Cohn, no medical translation app existed prior to theirs. Therefore, this is the first of its kind seen anywhere. A key feature is that the internet is not needed for full functionality. Once downloaded, the app can be utilized anywhere, at anytime as long as the mobile device has power.

This tool is currently paying dividends for health professionals in the developed world. However, MediBabble can easily be utilized by health processionals that encounter language barriers working on the ground in developing countries. The fifth language, Haitian Creole, was implemented for the earthquakes that struck Haiti in 2010. Therefore, it had already transcended the domestic boundaries.

After taking a look at its features, one realizes that the app is already acclimated for use in the developing world:

Once downloaded, it does not require an internet connection to deliver its service
it provides detailed examination instructions to the user
it has a self-guided tutorial that can teach someone like a community health worker or volunteer how to use it on the fly
it compensates for the deaf and/or noisy environments by having a mode that enables a full screen display in large letters

Utilizing MediBabble, health professionals from the developed world who go on aid missions around the world will worry less about language barriers. This may decrease the time it takes to examine a patient which means more patients can be examined and treated in the long run. The tool can change the way health workers interact with and treat citizens of the developing world. Therefore, aid agencies and NGO’s that deploy health professionals cannot overlook this tool.

Perhaps it won’t be long until MediBabble is used in the developing world. Blau and Cohn said the next five languages being introduced are German, French, Urdu, Hindi and Arabic. Four of those five tongues are predominantly spoken in certain developing countries.

Furthermore, Blau and Cohn intend to keep their app free. So far they have been able to do it with funding contributions from Apple, Google and Twitter. As long as the app is free, the tool will cost health professionals nothing, making it even more appealing for use in resource poor areas.

August 4, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Health, Maternal & Child Health, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Millions awarded for maternal health innovations

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah. Photo Credit: USAID

The Saving Lives at Birth program held its DevelopmentXChange event last week in Washington DC. The event was hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah and was sponsored by USAID, the Government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and The World Bank.

The program called for scholars, researchers, doctors, and entrepreneurs to develop innovative prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant women and newborns in rural, low resources setting around the time of birth. There were over 600 applications from around the world, and 77 finalists were chosen to attend this 3-day event held in Washington. At the end of the 3-day event, $14 million in grants were awarded to 25 of the 77 finalists.

The 77 ideas and projects fell into two categories: seed grant finalists and transition to scale finalists. The former were completely innovative and fresh ideas while the latter were already existing ideas that were calibrated to fit for maternal health purposes.

The projects and ideas highlighted gadgets, treatment schemes, prevention methods, health centers, strategic plans and a plethora of mobile phone related solutions. Finalists came from all over the United States and from over the world including Bangladesh, Kenya, India, Uganda, Pakistan, Switzerland and Australia.

Some of the 25 award nominees. Photo Credit: USAID

Many of the ideas that had mobile solution components used mobile phones as an ICT. One innovative project was from Kenya called mAfya which aimed to set up health specific kiosks that would offer basic medical services for free for maternal health issues. There was another project from Kenya that aimed to provide pregnant mothers vouchers to use towards health services through mBanking called Changamka.

Among the awardees, one project from Save the Children provided a mobile phone monitoring system for recording maternal and neonatal deaths. This, along with an electricity-free fetal heart rate monitoring component aims to give communities in Uganda better intra-partum response services. Another project originated from Healthpoint services in India that has already set up rural health clinics and provides water, and is looking to expand its maternal health services using an integrated telemedicine and mHealth system.

Saving Lives at Birth, the first program in a series of Grand Challenges for Development led by USAID. The Grand Challenges is an attempt to bring science, technology and innovation to the field of development, lowering the cost of helping the world’s poor and, in the process, saving lives, said USAID administrator Shah.

“Especially in these very difficult economic times … coming up with more innovative, more local and sustainable ways to make it cheaper and easier to help mothers survive child birth and help children survive the first 48 hours of life is what this program is all about,” added Shah.

Maternal and child health issues still need a lot of attention. A woman dies every two minutes in childbirth, and 99% of the deaths are in the developing world, according to the World Health Organization. Also, about 1.6 million neonatal deaths occur each year around the world. Additionally noteworthy is that only a handful of countries are set to meet Millennium Development Goal 5 of reducing maternal mortality by 2/3 by 2015.

August 1, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Health, Humanitarian Assistance, Infectious Diseases, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Tweets track down dengue fever in Brazil

Photo Credit: chinaview.cn

A research group led by scientists in Brazil has developed software that tracks outbreaks of dengue fever using the social media outlet twitter. This software was created thanks to coordination between two Brazilian National Institutes of Science and Technology, led by Wagner Meira, a computer scientist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

The software is designed to detect the word “dengue” in tweets and information about the sender’s location. The software analyzes the sentence structure and wording to determine if tweets are appropriate for dengue surveillance. Tweets that are deemed spurious or unrelated to dengue fever are filtered out.

During the testing phase, the researchers examined 2,447 tweets about dengue fever sent through the social networking portal between January and May 2009. They found a strong correlation between personal experience tweets about dengue and official data on outbreaks from the Brazilian Ministry of Health.

The research team now plans to analyze 181,845 tweets sent between December 2010 and April 2011, but are waiting for the ministry’s 2011 data before they do so. They also plan to incorporate other key words, mostly symptoms of dengue fever, into their detection scheme to gather more tweets.

Photo Credit: Twitter

This is the first time social media has been used for dengue fever surveillance, but it is not the first time social media has been used for real-time epidemic surveillance. Twitter was used to follow the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Furthermore, it is the first attempt to gather information on people tweeting about their personal experience of a disease.

Google also introduced Google Dengue Trends last month, which records spikes in web searches for dengue fever. Therefore, using social media for surveillance is not a new practice, and nor is tracking dengue using technology. However, Meira’s method is an innovative and efficient way to track dengue fever.

Dengue fever, which can cause hemorrhagic deaths, plagues Brazil ever year. Moreover, every year it emerges in different locations than before. Most Brazilians know how to control and even eradicate the disease, but the majority of citizens don’t take any precautions against it.

On top of that, outbreak notifications take several weeks to process and analyze which impedes officials from assisting citizens. Using Twitter messages could mean a much faster response, says Meira. “It isn’t predicting the future but the present,” he says. “This means we aren’t weeks behind like we used to be.”

July 25, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Health, Health, Health Systems, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

How is coordination possible in mHealth? Experts gather and discuss

The mHealth Working Group, a collaborative forum created in 2009 by K4Health, held a meeting yesterday that focused on the “Coordination of mHealth projects within and between organizations in the field.” The meeting brought together many experts from the field of mHealth in a meeting that was ripe with rich discussion and promising potential going forward in the field.

Representatives at the meeting came from a number of organizations including USAID, K4Health, John Snow Inc. (JSI), mHealth Alliance, and the UN foundation, just to name a few. Therefore, the meeting focused on mHealth implementation in the developing world rather than here at home where mHealth is much more sophisticated.

The overarching theme for the meeting was examining how to promote coordination amongst organizations that are active in mHealth. This is an important issue because of the lack of large scale mHealth efforts programs in the developing world and the dire lack of monitoring in existing mHealth programs.

The discussion began with the current status and perception of mHealth programs in the developing world. Michael Frost, an official from JSI, stated that mHealth is “exploding with a lot of new interest” but “needs to mature a little bit.” He also echoed claims found in the latest mHealth report, that “projects have a narrow focus, and they don’t have strong evaluation principles.”

Photo Credit: USAID

John Novak from USAID discussed the importance of external collaboration and USAID’s current efforts in structuring their standards for doing so. One of his take home messages here was that all parties involved with implementing mHealth projects, including the country government, ministry of Health, telecoms, NGO’s and medical professionals on the ground need to convene and join hands before implementing a project. One suggested way to accomplish this is creating “coordination groups” at the international and country levels that serve to bring the relevant players to the table.

Discussions about the mHealth Summit that took place early last month in Cape Town also surfaced. One presenter mentioned a case study in Bangladesh that highlighted the fruitful impact of government taking control of the telecom industry to implement mHealth initiatives at no cost to citizens. The presenter expressed that governments need to take more active roles in coordinating programs; it is an effective way to get programs rolled out.

Photo Credit: Hub

The meeting produced more than lectures and discussions. Two mHealth resources were presented that are designed to make the process of collaboration and coordinating easier. Frost from JSI discussed their mHealth center whose primary roles are to create mHealth initiatives and assist existing ones by improving communication and information sharing methods within them. The mHealth alliance introduced a new knowledge resource website called Health Unbound (Hub) that aims to bring different stakeholders together to share, collect and produce information on the intersection of technology and health. Hub is planned to be unveiled to the public in about a month.

The core discussion never strayed away from the importance of coordination amongst organizations involved with mHealth initiatives. Nearly everyone seemed to agree that coordination in vital, and all parties involved in the process of creating mHealth programs must be represented in the planning process.

So the next question to ask is, how do you manage to get everyone to the table given each country has a distinct political and economic climate? How do you mediate between governments that want power, telecoms that want money and NGO’s that have ambitious goals? The answer, I learned, is multifaceted. Nonetheless I will attempt to discuss them over the next few posts with the information provided at the meeting. And even better, the answers will continue to be discussed over the next round of mHealth Working Group meetings.

July 21, 2011/by actualize

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