mHealth

mHealth Africa Summit—the Personal Emerging

January 2011 by Dykki Settle
TAGS: Health Systems Strengthening, Health Workers, mHealth

This post is excerpted from an original post on the IntraHealth International blog.

Dykki SettleLike the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC in November, the mHealth Africa Summit in Accra, Ghana was well-organized and filled with energy. It was also much smaller. This meant that the conversations were intimate and impassioned, and as expected, much more personal.

As my colleague Piers Bocock at Management Sciences for Health pointed out in his blog, this conference offered great examples of country ownership. Like Piers, I, too, learned far more at this inaugural and important conference than I felt able to teach. It also offered me a great opportunity to hear more about the ways mobile phones were already being used by health workers, which I think is key to mHealth’s success, traction, and scalability. Read more »

Crowdsourcing: The New Buzz in Productivity and Quality

January 2011 by Laura Wurts
TAGS: Crowdsource, Health Workers, mHealth, Productivity

Laura WurtsCapacityPlus is developing a crowdsourcing application and exploring pilot sites in several countries. This initiative will allow the general public with any mobile telephone—with simple SMS texting capability—to report on the presence or absence of health workers, patient waiting times, or other selected quality or productivity indicators at any given clinic at any point in time.

Unless health workers report to their assigned facilities at the agreed upon hours and efficiently manage their time, increasing the production of qualified health workers is meaningless.

However, a relatively easy method for improving health worker productivity is through crowdsourcing. Read more »

mHealth: The Possibilities of the Personal

November 2010 by Dykki Settle
TAGS: Health Systems Strengthening, Health Workers, mHealth

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog.

Dykki SettleThere are more than 5 billion cell phones in use worldwide, which means globally nearly 70% of people—including children—would own a cell phone if everyone had just one cell. Yet in places like Germany, where the cell phone market penetration has reached more than 130%, many people own more than one mobile.

Mobile phones are so popular in part because they are uniquely personal communication tools. Their portability makes it possible to talk to colleagues, friends, and family from nearly anywhere and anytime.

With mobile phones, we’ve managed to extend our social circles from the immediate to the global. Read more »

Global Health Workforce News of Interest

June 2010 by Sarah L. Dwyer
TAGS: Community Health Workers, Maternal Health, mHealth, Skilled Birth Attendants

Health worker in UgandaHere are five articles I found particularly interesting this week:

Effect of Peer Health Workers on AIDS Care in Rakai, Uganda
This article in the PloS ONE journal reports on the findings of “a cluster randomized trial to assess the effect of community-based peer health workers (PHW) on AIDS care of adults in Rakai, Uganda.” The authors conclude that “PHWs may be an effective intervention to sustain long-term ART in low-resource settings.”

Over 2,000 Health Workers Get Free Phones
The New Times (Rwanda) reports that community health workers in Karongi District “will get free mobile phones as part of government’s efforts to boost the health sector through the use of science and technology.” The phones “are part of an ongoing countrywide campaign to ensure efficient and timely submission of monthly medical reports to the Ministry of Health.”

Read more »
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