As mobile health advocates clamor for scientific proof to support their emerging field, Johns Hopkins University has introduced mHealth Evidence, an online reference tool designed to help researchers quickly locate literature demonstrating the feasibility, usability and efficacy of mobile technologies in healthcare.
After a soft launch in June, the Center for Communication Programs at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore this week formally introduced mHealth Evidence via the school's federally funded Knowledge for Health (K4Health) project. "We wanted to have one, designated site to bring together mHealth evidence," Heidi Good Boncana, a program officer for strategic communication, ICT and innovation in the Center for Communication Programs, told MobiHealthNews.
"For a long time, people were claiming that there was no evidence," Boncana said. That is changing for sure, but there still are shortcomings. "All of the evidence that does exist is kind of disparate," Boncana said.
The mHealth Evidence site brings together sources and research related to feasibility, usability and efficacy of mobile healthcare technologies, though Boncana said there still remains limited data on health outcomes. It includes a searchable database and what Boncana said is a way to help researchers know where there are gaps in the literature.
mHealth Evidence currently contains close to 4,400 records, and will automatically pulls in new, relevant citations from PubMed, the National Library of Medicine's index of medical literature. In the future, the service will add searches from "gray" literature such as that indexed by Google Scholar, including blog posts, presentations and discussions from professional listservs, according to Boncana. She added that K4Health also will be manually combing literature and taking submissions from users to add to the knowledge base.
Next month, K4Health will begin tagging all records in the mHealth Evidence database, a process Boncana expects to be complete by the end of the year.
Users can query mHealth Evidence keywords, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms, PubMed ID codes, dates, and locations. Location search, according to Boncana, allows for people to see, for example, how technologies work across all of East Africa, not just individual countries.
Registered users can save searches and set up email alerts. mHealth Evidence supports OAuth open authorization so users can sign in with Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts.
Visitors to the site also can simply browse through various topics, including patient age ranges, care delivery models, type of mobile application, stage of technology development and intended user bases.
Access is free. K4Health is supported by the US Agency for International Development. USAID recently awarded the JHU Center for Communication Programs a 5-year, $40 million grant to improve knowledge and information sharing in global health programs, particularly for family planning and reproductive health, Boncana said.
