Healthcare at the touch of a button
By Lanre Akinola | Published: 01 October, 2009
The use of mobile telecommunications technology to tackle sub-Saharan Africa’s healthcare challenges has attracted much interest. But can mobile technology actually
fill the gap left by underdeveloped healthcare systems? Lanre Akinola reports
One of the most striking developments to take place on the African continent in recent years has been the mobile telecommunications revolution. From a virtual standing start, the continent now has 300 million mobile phone subscribers, with the penetration rate fast approaching 30 percent.
This growth is opening new possibilities to address the developmental challenges of the region, including the nascent mobile healthcare industry. Various “mHealth” initiatives seek to apply mobile technology to what is arguably one of the continent’s biggest challenges; the widespread underdevelopment of healthcare systems. An acute shortage of resources and trained staff means that more than 50 percent of the region’s population is estimated to lack access to modern healthcare facilities.
However, most mHealth projects are currently small in scale, and fragmentation has put a brake on the expansion of mobile healthcare solutions. In addition, leapfrogging the infrastructure gap in the healthcare sector may prove more of a challenge, and a lack of quantifiable evidence to support the effectiveness of mHealth has led some to question the actual impact it can have.
One of the organisations at the forefront of the mobile healthcare debate is the partnership between the Vodafone Foundation and the UN Foundation, formed in 2004. In 2009 it published one of the first major reports on the field of mHealth, detailing the areas in which mobile technology can address deficiencies in developing world healthcare markets, such as sub-Saharan Africa. The report lists six main areas in which mobile
telecommunications can address healthcare challenges, focusing on remote data collection and patient monitoring, as well as disease tracking, education and awareness and healthcare worker training. The emphasis on all points is the ability of mobile telecommunications to overcome geographical and infrastructural obstacles.
“There is still so much paper-based health data collection,” says Claire Thwaites, head of the partnership. “That paper takes so long to get to the national ministry, be analysed, and then you are months away from responding to an epidemic on the ground. For the first time you are seeing data being collected on mobile phones and wireless devices, and that data being analysed virtually in real-time.”
The report goes on to profile 51 different projects. These are mostly small-scale and fragmented pilot initiatives and Ms Thwaites argues that “the key to success here is scaling up and sustainability for these projects and programmes.” In order to do this, Vodafone and the UN officially launched the mHealth Alliance, together with the Rockefeller Foundation, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2009. The objective of the alliance is to reduce the level of fragmentation in the mHealth field through more extensive research, as well as building partnerships between different stakeholders to scale-up selected programmes.
Major technology firms such as Google are also interested in the field of mHealth and e-health. Last year, the firm launched Google Health in the US market, an online tool that
