The mobile industry's GSM Association recently funded a survey of 2,000 healthcare providers, patients and consumers in four different countries to better understand the perceptions they had about mobile health. Obviously, a prerequisite for participating in the survey was an understanding or familiarity with mobile health, so those surveyed were a very particular group of providers and consumers...
Mark Blatt and Ebenezer Appiah-Denkyira
Texting programs for health education in developing countries have been around for over a decade, but several factors are bringing global health efforts to a new scale in 2012, including increasing mobile adoption in developing countries and an increased spirit of collaboration.
Nafis Sadik, a United Nations Foundation board member, has worked with the UN...
The world's oldest international public health organization has introduced its first mobile app, to help professionals track the health, fitness and safety of students and other adolescent populations.
Called eGSHS, the iPhone/iPad app from the 110-year-old Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) is a mobile version of the widely used Global School-based...
mHealth Alliance Executive Director Patricia Mechael
Eight companies, programs and non-governmental organizations -- including one associated with former President Bill Clinton -- have received two-year "catalytic" grants to foster wider use of mobile technologies in the name of improving maternal and child health worldwide.
The mHealth Alliance, a global project founded by the United Nations...
Health IT built for foreign markets generally doesn't translate well to the U.S.
A widely heard criticism of many American electronic health records (EHR) systems in the U.S. is that they're designed not primarily to enable clinicians to provide the best patient care, but to help providers produce the documentation they need to get paid. That's just the nature of our inefficient, fee-for-service...
If Ethiopia is to achieve two of the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, mobile technologies will need to play a central role, according to a proposed strategic plan now being circulated in global development spheres. The document is intended to serve as a model for other countries considering national mobile health strategies.
The UN wants developing countries such as Ethiopia to...
Medic Mobile recently unveiled a SIM mobile application for healthcare at the Mobile Health Summit in Cape Town, South Africa. SIM apps are more accessible to users of a wide variety of mobile devices; they run on 80 percent of the world's mobile phones, including, importantly, inexpensive mobile phones that are popular in developing countries. Africa currently has 50 percent mobile users, but...
This week GigaOM Pro posted a report penned by longtime global health analyst Jody Ranck -- who recently joined the mHealth Alliance's executive board -- on the rising trend of mobile health applications. Ranck's paper serves as a well-crafted, high level overview of activity in the global mobile health field. While it's 25 pages long, the report moves swiftly from one topic to the next and is a...
