At the mHealth Summit in Washington DC this week, Patricia Mechael, PhD, MHS, Director of Strategic Application of Mobile Technology for Public Health and Development, Center for Global Health and Economic Development at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, shared her top ten lessons learned from global mobile health implementations.
1. Capitalized on what others have done, what others have learned.
2. Evaluate the impact of mobile technologies to support behavior change.
3. Locally-generated content is important. Be sure to appropriately contextualize information makes it more meaningful.
4. Adapting materials to mobile is a challenging undertaking.
5. Move away from research focus on user satisfaction and actually evaluate the impact of health outcomes.
6. Be realistic and don’t get caught up in the hype. Tone it down, at least.
7. Take a systems-thinking approach and move away from single-issue focus.
8. Recycle, repurpose, reuse; don’t reinvent the wheel, (especially if it’s a flat tire, as another speaker quipped.)
9. mHealth at scale can only come from strong leadership linking technology with health priorities and looking for most appropriate tools that exist. Look for public-private partnerships.
10. It’s not about technology.
More resources available over at the OpenMRS Wiki here and Movements.org here