Medic Mobile | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

By Katie Kelly, Medic Mobile

Maeghan Orton and Dianna Kane, guest speakers at TechChange

Dianna Kane, Senior Designer, and Maeghan Orton, Africa Regional Director, are frontwomen for the Skoll Award Winning nonprofit, Medic Mobile. The groundbreaking technology company is now helping 9,000 health workers in 20 countries reach more people using mobile tools. They’ll be sharing their experience on April 3rd as part of the TechChange course, “Mobile Phones for Public Health”, this Friday.

Attendees of the course will be introduced to the pieces that make up a successful Medic Mobile mHealth partnership. These must be present for a project to be successful, sustainable, and lead to scale.

Tools – Choosing the right tool is not as intuitive as it sounds. You need to employ empathy, human-centered design, and a lot of logic to know what to build for a specific community.
Strategy – Invite the Ministry of Health and other government bodies to get involved early; they can be your greatest advocate and help support your project into the future.
Funding – Your project needs to be secure in its funding in order to continue. You may need to employ creative ways to ensure a projects can sustain itself.
Continuous Design – Your mHealth program needs to keep evolving as the project and user needs change.

Participants will also learn from Medic Mobile’s vast experience employing human-centered design. “Users are at the center of everything we do,” says Dianna, “Our process begins when we sit down with community health workers, nurses, patients, and community members.”

Interested in learning more? Join students from more than 20 countries around the world in the Spring 2015 session of Mobile Phones for Public Health. It is still not too late to sign up! Can’t make it this round? Be sure to mark your calendar for the Fall 2015 session!

About Katie

Katie loves creative storytelling and is excited to shine a spotlight on Medic Mobile’s incredible mission. She comes to Medic Mobile with a background in marketing and advertising, telling stories for big brands like Hershey and Proctor & Gamble and young startups like Rdio and Dot & Bo. Katie has also volunteered her writing for Watsi and DailyGood. She is unabashedly in love with travel, yoga, capture the flag and writing young adult fiction.

Since the mobile phone has become a global tool for social good, it can be tough to keep up with the many different mobile products and platforms being used across international development. With 2014 estimated to be the year when global mobile subscriptions will surpass the number of people in the world, more than ever, mobile technologies are tackling challenges in public health, agriculture, education, banking, data collection and management, surveys, journalism, and beyond.

These are just a few of the tools and organizations that we’ve featured in our M4D course over the years. What other tools are you excited about? Are there any mobile platforms/products that we missed? Let us know!

Want to learn more about these mobile tools? How about where and how this technology is being applied successfully across the world? Enroll now in our Mobiles for International Development online course which runs February 10 – March 7, 2014. In this course, you’ll see live demos some of these tools by mobile tech experts who have used this tech in the context of data collection, farming, healthcare, education, finance, and more.

Click below to check out our full-size infographic illustrating the Mobiles for International Development landscape.

What if your old phone could help improve the health of populations in developing nations? Did you know that 500,000 cell phones are discarded in the United States every day?

TechChange is donating phones to empower global health practitioners in developing countries via Medic Mobile’s Hope Phones mobile donation program. The program’s goal is to responsibly reduce hazardous waste from mobile electronics while simultaneously promoting public health in developing countries.

When Nick Martin and Medic Mobile’s president, Josh Nesbit, last met during PopTech 2013, they instantly connected over their common interest in mHealth. Although the number of mobile phones and mobile subscriptions are increasing worldwide, there is still a significant need to empower global community health workers with these tools to promote better health for more people. According to the Medic Mobile, “If we can recycle just 1% of disposed phones each year, we can outfit 1 million health workers, improving the lives of 50 million people.”

There is also a need to learn the latest best practices and innovations in mHealth. Learn how you can donate your phone here and join us in our upcoming mHealth online course with the mHealth Alliance! This course regularly attracts an exciting global community of doctors, public health practitioners, mobile service providers, health research specialists, and others to learn how mobile technology can address HIV, tuberculosis, maternal health, vaccinations, and improve healthcare delivery. Hope to see you in the course!

This piece has been crossposted from Health Unbound. If you’re interested in learning more, please visit our course page on mHealth: Mobile Phones for Public Health.

On November 14th the Mobile Phones for Global Health Online Certificate course officially kicks off and as we head into the final countdown we are offering a special preview of what participants can expect from the four-week course!

With 75 feedback survey s completed (thank you to all those who participated) we identified some of the most well-known thought leaders in the field speaking throughout the course. Students will have the opportunity to engage directly with leading applications developers, and learn from practitioners who have had significant experience in implementing mobile phone based communication systems around the globe. The agenda will include:

Weekly Course Topics:

Week 1: Introduction to Mobile Health
Week 2: Strengthening health systems
Week 3: Moving towards citizen-centered health
Week 4: Technology Standards & Interoperability and Learning from other mServices

Featured Speakers:
Patty Mechael, Executive Director of the mHealth Alliance will provide students with an engaging introduction to the field, discussing the evolution of mobile phones for international health, and how these technologies are being used to today to respond to some of the greatest global health challenges.

Kicking off week 2, Joel Selanikio, co-founder of DataDyne, will present on the development of Episurveyor, and how mobile phones are being used to collect, manage, and sort data.

Also in week two, the class will be joined by Isaac Holeman, Chief Strategist for Medic Mobile, who will engage with students on the range of open source applications in the Medic Mobile toolkit – including the well-known Frontline SMS system that allows computers to send messages to large groups of people at a low cost.

A number of other guest speakers and presenters will also be featured. Stay tuned as we get closer by checking the course landing page.

In addition to these guest speakers, participants will engage with case studies, multimedia tutorials, interactive exercises, and live demonstrations of such tools as interactive voice recognition (IVR), SMS (text message) communication programs, smartphone applications, and health information systems for data collection and management. Through this combination of hands-on experience, and engagement with practitioners on the ground, the goal is to provide students with an in-depth introduction to the field of mHealth.

Participate in the Live Twitter Chat and YOU Could Win 2 Free Passes!

Leading up the course, the mHealth Alliance and TechChange will provide an opportinity to for individuals to win a free pass to enroll in the course! Together TechChange and the mHealth Alliance will host a live-Twitter chat from @techchange and @mHealthAlliance using #tc309 on Friday, October 26 at 1pm EDT.

During the chat we will engage all participants in a variety of discussion topic and questions related to mHealth. We’re eager to hear from you about questions that you may have on latest innovations and projects in the field. All participants in the twitter chat will be included in a drawing to win a free seat in our upcoming course: mHealth Mobile Phones for Public Health. We will give a away a total of 2 seats. More details to come but tweet at @techchange or @mHealthAlliance if you have questions, and we look forward to having you join us there!