Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

According to a recent report by Grand View Research, Inc., the global market for the mHealth (mobile health) industry will reach $42.12 billion dollars by year 2020. That same year, GSMA estimates that smartphone connections will reach 6 billion, fuelled by growth in the developing world and mobile broadband expansion. The mobile phone market, the largest and most profitable segment of the global device market, is expected to total 1.9 billion units in 2015 alone.

With these high expectations for mHealth and smartphone adoption, what are the biggest opportunities for this $42.12 billion market?

We discussed this topic when we held a panel discussion in partnership with General Assembly DC at their office in Washington, DC in November 2014. In a rare opportunity to combine both “healthies” and “techies” in one room, we gathered a panel including Arthur Sabintsev, lead mobile architect at ID.me and instructor of General Assembly DC’s Mobile Development classes and workshops; Jessica Taaffe, global health and science consultant and writer at the World Bank; and our own Kendra Keith, mobile health specialist; and TechChange CEO Nick Martin – both of whom have facilitated our popular online course on mHealth. During this hour-long panel, we discussed a wide variety of topics on the mobile applications for public health.

Here are some of the highlights of “Mobile Development for Public Health” panel where the panelists shared insights that still ring true across the $42.12 billion dollar mHealth space.

1. mHealth can strengthen health systems

The need to strengthen health systems are the biggest challenges for public health, according to Jessica and Kendra, both of whom hold graduate degrees in microbiology and public health, respectively.

“The greatest opportunities for mHealth field and mobile developers focused on public health are in the public health sector, said Jessica. “The biggest public health issues are governance and figuring out the roles needed to fight infectious diseases and non-communicable diseases that are on the rise, especially as people are living longer.”

There are already several great examples of mHealth apps and programs that are strengthening health systems, including MAMA, MedAfrica, Dimagi, CommCare, and others.

2. mHealth can allow healthcare services to reach more people across the world

The ubiquity and diversity of mobile phones and their global usage will be a key driver of the mHealth industry reaching up to tens of billions of dollars, especially as GSMA estimates that there will be one billion unique mobile subscribers by 2020.

In their experience teaching the one of TechChange’s most popular online courses on mHealth, Nick and Kendra discussed the unique challenges of mHealth outside developed countries.

“Pay-as-you-go mobile phones are the most prominent form of mobiles in developing countries,” said Nick. “This model makes it more affordable for people to get internet access, and it will only get cheaper especially as players like Facebook and Google are ambitiously trying to get the entire world online.”

Clockwise from the top-left: TechChange CEO Nick Martin, mobile developer and General Assembly instructor Arthur Sabintsev, global health expert Jessica Taafe, and TechChange mobile specialist Kendra Keith.

3. Mobile development for health will become a hotter space for mobile developers through 2020

As a former nuclear scientist turned mobile developer himself, Arthur stressed how there are never enough mobile developers to meet demand in the current global market, much less the global mHealth market. Across the panel, everyone agreed that is it not easy to become a mobile developer, and to keep up with the quickly-evolving skill set demanded for building modern apps.

“Why aren’t there more developers building mHealth apps? Because it’s hard and time-consuming,” said Arthur. “There’s simply not enough time in a day to keep up with all the different standards for different operating systems, as well as all of their respective constant software updates. Although Android phones are used more in the developing world than iOS in western societies, there is a huge problem of Android fragmentation. What you tend to see more of now is that jobs in mobile development are mostly in the finance and advertising industries. If mHealth is truly going to grow to be worth $42.12 billion dollars, I’m excited to see more mobile dev jobs and incentives for this space to grow.”

So how do you incentivize mobile developers to build more mHealth apps for public health?

Nick mentioned that doing so will not be easy, given that mHealth/public health initiatives are often funded by governments or foundations that have procurement cycles. Though there are some initiatives such as the IBM Watson Venture Fund that has contributed to companies such as WellTok, funding long-term mHealth development has proven tough to sustain so far.

Another opportunity for mHealth will be in protecting the data collected in mHealth apps and programs. mHealth is fraught with mobile data security concerns in places where privacy policies are both well-established or barely existent.

What opportunities do you see for the growing mHealth global market? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet us @TechChange.

If you’re interested in learning more about the opportunities for mHealth, sign up now for our mHealth online course! The next round begins this Monday, 30 March 2015.

Being a first-time mother is hard, even for those of us lucky enough to have our babies in developed countries. Through the fog of fatigue and the hotbed of hormones, we try to sort through the avalanche of advice and do what is best for our newborns. How much harder it must be for women who are so poor that they struggle just to survive.

This is why I was so impressed by the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA). They take what is universal about being a new parent and transform it to fit each country where they work. Through text or voice messages timed to the woman’s weeks of pregnancy or her baby’s age, they deliver culturally sensitive, medically approved message to the mother’s mobile phone – and to her husband and other household members too, if desired. (That way, she’s not getting one message from her phone and a different one from her mother-in-law.)

The messages tell the mother what’s going on with the baby in her womb and help her understand the symptoms she might be feeling. They also recommend actions to improve her health and that of her baby, such as getting plenty of iron or exclusively breastfeeding. I subscribed to a similar service from Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter when I was pregnant, and it was immensely satisfying to read that my baby was the size of an avocado (a different fruit or vegetable every week!) and that women everywhere at the same stage of pregnancy were going through roughly the same things I was.

Even the best-educated moms can use help and reminders. I was a medical journalist, but I didn’t know about one of MAMA’s messages: Talk to your baby. Luckily, my mother-in-law was staying with me, and one day I noticed that the more she chattered to my son, the more he babbled back.

MAMA targets countries where there are high maternal and child mortality rates as well as high mobile penetration rates. It has seen remarkable uptake in Bangladesh (more than 500,000 users) and South Africa (350,000), and now is launching in India. In Bangladesh, phone surveys show that MAMA subscribers have almost twice the rate of prenatal and postnatal doctor visits and giving birth in a facility, as well as increased rates of exclusive breastfeeding – all important factors in reducing the number of women and babies who die in childbirth or infancy.

But perhaps MAMA’s greatest strength is that it brings mothers together across countries and socioeconomic levels. Rather than assuming that women in developing countries need different information, it takes the BabyCenter content and localizes it – and also makes it available to other organizations that want to do similar work.
MAMA’s service recognizes that the poor are not all that different from the rest of us – biologically, they are identical, and as new mothers, they have many of the same questions and doubts. MAMA makes brilliant use of mobile technology to address their needs.

Elizabeth Howton is an online communications officer at the World Bank. Opinions in this blog post are her own and not her employer’s.

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If you’re interested learning more about MAMA and mHealth, please join us in your upcoming courses on Mobiles for International Development and Mobiles for Public Health.

Mobile phones are more than just communications devices; they are also powerful tools to improve health care. Since 2012, TechChange and the mHealth Alliance have offered a four-week online certificate course in mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health.

Our mHealth course has brought together an incredible group of roughly 100 doctors, community health workers, academic researchers, IT administrators, and government officials from over 35 countries to share knowledge. Each time we do the course, we’ve been amazed at how mHealth has advanced global health.

Here are the three key mobile innovations changing the delivery of health care services that we’ll cover in our next course, which starts on November 18th.

1. Text Messages for Pregnant Mothers

Nearly 800 women die of childbirth or pregnancy-related complications every day, and 2.9 million newborn deaths occur every year. At the same time, at least 1 billion women in low- and middle-income countries own mobile phones, providing a promising opportunity to use mobile phones to improve maternal and child health. On Mother’s Day 2011, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), a public-private partnership between USAID, Johnson & Johnson, the mHealth Alliance, the United Nations Foundation, and BabyCenter.

MAMA message templates can be downloaded for free, which means any organization can take advantage of this content to prepare pregnant mothers for childbirth. In our online course, we’ll learn how to customize these messages for different contexts and help participants determine what technical platforms are best for delivering these messages. SMS technical platforms we plan to feature include FrontlineSMS, Telerivit, Voto Mobile, EngageSpark, and Textit.

2. Support for Community Health Workers

A recent report by Dalberg found that Sub-Saharan Africa will need to train more than 1 million additional community health workers to keep up with health care demands. Medic Mobile and Last Mile Health are two organizations working to provide training to community health care workers in countries like Liberia and Malawi. They have teamed up to create a mobile network for a district in Liberia and to design a mobile application that will dramatically improve community health care worker training and management. This mobile app will also improve community health care worker communication with clinicians based in health facilities. The mobile platform will also include automatic data collection and a reporting system that will create stronger, more efficient systems to manage patient records and monitor data quality.

Learn about how these organizations are using mobile technology to provide training for community health care workers and what other technologies and strategies organizations can use to provide similar support to marginalized populations. As part of the mHealth course, we’ll feature workshops with some of the leading software platforms for data collection and patient management, including CommCare and Magpi.

3. Moving Beyond the Pilot Phase

In recent years, a great deal of mHealth projects have entered the pilot phase, but few have gone on to reach scale. Among those that have scaled are Ureport, an SMS-based civic engagement platform based in Kenya, and Project Mwana in Zambia, which works to increase the testing and treatment of infants born with HIV. These projects show that with adequate preparation and when designing with scale in mind, it is possible to move beyond the pilot stage and increase the reach of mHealth programs.

However, sometimes barriers to scale can come from funders’ reluctance to support scaling programs rather than funding new and innovative ones. In our online mHealth course, we will look at strategies to get beyond scale, including human-centered design, working with funders, and learning from past mistakes.

We hope you decide to join us and meet all kinds of professionals from around the world working in the field of mHealth. Don’t miss out on what will be a great course!

Join this global mHealth learning community by signing up for the course today.

According to the mHealth Alliance, in developing countries, the average doctor to patient ratio is 1 doctor for every 250,000 patients. Yet those same countries account for nearly 80% of the over 5 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide.

For people everywhere, access to a mobile phone can mean better access to health information, which leads to more informed choices and improved well-being. A great example of how mobile phones are making a difference in promoting health is with the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action partnership that “has developed free, adaptable messages informed by experts in maternal, newborn and child health” that are being used and downloaded by 161 organizations in 54 nations around the world.

To learn more about how mobile phones are affecting developing nations in the realms of public health and beyond, check out our upcoming courses on Mobiles for International Development and mHealth. Also see our guest blog post from the mPulse blog on how we’re teaming up again with mHealth Alliance to mobilize mobile health with online learning.