How would you define mHealth?
Check out these mHealth definitions from a few of the attendees from last December’s mHealth Summit 2013 in Washington, DC, including several speakers and alumni from our mHealth online course:
Do you define mHealth differently or similarly? How has mHealth impacted your life and work?
Let us know, and join us for our next round of TC309: mHealth – Mobile Phones for Public Health!
Mercy (pictured with Maeghan Ray Orton from Medic Mobile) at UMCom workshop in Malawi
Mobile phones seem to be everywhere in Africa, and they’re keeping people in touch with health, education, banking, and community empowerment.
“Email and Facebook are problems…but this text messaging – it’s no problem,” says Betty Kazadi Musau who lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
In early August 2013, I spent the week with Mercy Chikhosi Nyirongo, who provides healthcare in communities in Malawi. Recently, she took an online course through TechChange called “Mobile Phones for Public Health.” She wondered what impact mobile phones could have on her health program in Madisi, so she conducted a test.
The problem: HIV+ men were not coming to the support group and health management classes.
The test: Separate into two control groups – one would receive text reminders about the next meeting and the other would not.
The results: Out of the 20 who did not receive text messages, five attended. Out of the 30 who did receive text messages, 25 attended and were standing in queue when she arrived.
One client said, “You reached me where I was.” This isn’t a small thing. Often community health workers walk miles to find someone only to learn they are away. But the mobile phones stay with the person – making them much easier to reach.
Mercy conducted this test directly through her mobile phone and it took her nearly all day. But with FrontlineSMS, she can enter mobile numbers easily for group messaging. She said, “After the online course, the UMCom workshop (in Blantyre), and these conversations, my eyes have become wide open.”
Join us in our next round of Mobiles for International Development and mHealth: Mobiles for Public Health online courses!
To read the original post on Neelley’s blog, “Stories in ICT4D”, please click here.
The Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame is launching a pilot initiative with TechChange to experiment with blended learning online and offline on the topic of mHealth: Mobiles for Public Health. As part of Notre Dame’s continuing experiments of best practices in online and hybrid learning, this initiative of the Master of Science in Global Health program will be combining an on-campus class on mHealth taught by Professor Joseph Bock with TechChange’s mHealth online course. According to Dr. Bock, “This pilot course is an exciting initiative and we are eager to promote it.”
Notre Dame’s Master of Science in Global Health program is sponsoring 11 students and program directors to join TechChange’s mHealth online course in conjunction with Professor Joseph Bock’s face-to-face offline mHealth class, which aims to equip students with technical knowledge to apply mobile and Information Communications Technology (ICT) for global health challenges. The school will be receiving data on the students’ participation on the course platform from TechChange, which along with their written assignments for the Master of Science in Global Health class, will factor into determining the students’ grades. As the students will be logged in and participating in TechChange’s online learning platform, Professor Joseph Bock will be meeting in person with the students weekly to discuss the content on the TechChange mHealth course and the professor’s assignments.
In partnership with the mHealth Alliance, TechChange has offered this mHealth: Mobiles for International Development online course four times since 2012. The course, which has been mentioned in the New York Times, has welcomed over 450 doctors, nurses, community health workers, and global public health experts who regularly participate in this online course from over 75 countries. Participants have included representatives of organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Medicin Sans Frontieres (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Cleveland Clinic, Global Health Corps, officials from ministries of health of several countries, and many more.
Notre Dame’s MS in Global Health students have been enthusiastic about beginning the mHealth course, which will run March 31 to April 25, 2014 – just before final exams and before the students travel abroad to pursue summer global health field and research projects. Several students plan on tying in their mHealth online learnings into their planned field work after this semester, including Michael Clark, who believes this mHealth course will help focus his current project to track mosquito-borne disease in Belize using a mobile database platform by meeting other global mHealth practitioners in the online class.
“The mHealth course will help focus my efforts in Belize as it teaches best practices learned through collaboration with local partners across the world,” says Michael Clark. “Further, I look forward to the invaluable tips for implementing ICT4D in previously technology-deprived areas, like rural Belize, that the expert lecturers and current global health practitioners will be able to provide.”
Jingmeng Xie plans to build upon her past experience at a Nairobi maternal health clinic (a Ford Family Program) by applying the content she learned in the mHealth classes to explore the roles mobile technology can play in public health. The MS in Global Health students, through the mHealth initiative, are diving deeply into the role that mobile data collection, electronic health records, and Information and Communications Technologies can promote better health for populations even in the most remote areas in the world. Another student, Thomas Ulsby, is preparing for his summer research trip to India where he hopes to learn how electronic reporting of blood glucose levels via mobile phones has impacted treatment plans for type I and type II diabetes.
We’re very excited to welcome these students from the University of Notre Dame and can’t wait to see how they’ll be applying their experience in mHealth to their summer field projects in India, Belize, Kenya, and beyond!
Interested in learning about mHealth this spring as well? Register now for our mHealth: Mobiles for Public Health online course.
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.
We’re excited to be mentioned in the New York Times in an article on mobile technology for social good!
The article, titled “Ubiquitous Across Globe, Cellphones Have Become Tool for Doing Good”, discusses how mobile phones are becoming more useful beyond entertainment in developing countries and emerging markets. Increasingly, organizations are using SMS text messages to provide goods and services including water, energy, financial services, healthcare, and education.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
The number of [mobile public-private partnerships] seems likely to increase. “The development community is eager to learn more about how to use mobiles effectively,” said Nick Martin, a founder of TechChange, a social enterprise based in Washington that educates development practitioners via online courses.
Mr. Martin said his most popular course has been Mobiles for Development. In the last three years, TechChange has taught the course eight times to nearly 400 participants from over 60 countries.
MHealth, or mobiles used for health services, is the most “evolved” of the mobile sectors, Mr. Martin said. Large-scale campaigns in mHealth have focused primarily on maternal health and vaccination campaigns.
Check out the entire article in the New York Times here.
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.
Meet Carolyn Florey, this week’s featured TechChange alumna who we interviewed this week in her office at the World Bank. A serial TechChange participant of over five courses to date, Carolyn started taking TechChange courses in 2011 to supplement her Master’s program at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and has since been coming back for more continuing education in her ICT4D career.
Read Carolyn’s story below:
What interested you in taking TechChange courses? As a graduate student of International Development at Johns Hopkins SAIS, I wanted to focus on tech innovation in developing countries. I had taken a course at SAIS on the Politics of Humanitarian Aid that touched a bit on the use of technology for crisis mapping and disaster relief and wanted to learn more. I enrolled in TechChange’s TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management and was hooked. From there, I crafted an independent study around the format and content of TechChange courses.
What did you find useful from TechChange courses that keeps you coming back? Based on my experience taking TechChange courses in Mobiles in Development, mHealth, mData, mAccess, and Digital Organizing and Open Government, I continue taking TechChange courses for professional development and networking in my industry. Here’s why:
TechChange is at the pulse of ICT4D. TechChange is great at weaving together the application of technology across sectors and industries. You always need to keep up with what’s happening, especially in this field. They’re always updating the syllabi to share the latest industry information and inviting the most relevant industry experts as guest speakers. I found that TechChange always offered courses with both breadth and depth. For example, TC105: Mobiles in International Development was a good introduction for cross-sector applications of different mobile tools, while TC309 on mHealth let me narrow my focus to relevant topics for my daily work in the Global Health Bureau at USAID.
Course format and flexibility. In graduate school, I was working 30 hours a week and going to school full time with a five-course workload, so I needed the flexibility that TechChange gave to supplement my curriculum at SAIS. In my independent study, TechChange courses were helpful resources when I wrote papers and organized events for the SAIS Careers in Development club. The format and content is convenient to access as live events are recorded and archived, and course materials are available even 4 months after a course ends.
Learning industry lingo and key players. One valuable take away from TechChange courses is learning key terms and industry influencers to build and demonstrate expertise in ICT4D. For example, the mHealth content I was exposed to in TC105 came through in my interview for my former role at USAID, and I think ultimately helped me get the job.
What impact has TC105 had on you and your career? TechChange is part of my regular continuing education to stay up-to-date with the most relevant information on the ICT4D industry. I’ve also made some very meaningful connections through my TechChange courses. At this point in my career, TechChange has evolved for me to become a valuable networking tool. One example of this was the TechChange happy hour during the mHealth Summit in Washington, DC last December that brought together participants of the mHealth TC309 course and attendees of the Summit.
What advice would you give to students taking TC105 or any TC course?
Make attending live events a priority. Look at the live event discussions as part of your continuing education. Rarely will you get an hour of access to these industry experts.
Focus on what you’re most interested in. If you’re juggling work, a TechChange course, and sometimes other courses as well, all the information can get overwhelming. Make sure to review the TechChange course syllabus ahead of time and focus on the things you’re interested in, prioritizing one week’s content over another if necessary.
Read through other participants’ comments and questions. Often, other participants will have experience you don’t, so they’ll have some informed questions and insightful comments.
About Carolyn Florey
Carolyn Florey is an Operations Officer at the World Bank Institute’s Innovation Labs. Prior to joining WBI, Carolyn worked as a Private Sector Partnerships Specialist at USAID, focusing on mobile technology and health partnerships. She has worked in the ICT for development space for the past few years at organizations such as Jhpiego, NetHope, the Federal Communications Commission, and Earth Institute across sectors including mHealth, mobile money, women’s access and eAgriculture. She also worked at the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank’s Development Marketplace, a women’s health NGO in Delhi (Breakthrough), and as a Fulbright grantee in South Korea. She has an MA in International Development from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a BA from Tufts University. You can find Carolyn on Twitter @carolynflorey.
With high expectations for mobile health initiatives, and a proliferation of pilot projects (see this map from Uganda), it can be easy to forget that the mHealth field is still young. Like any emergent industry, mHealth is currently experiencing growing pains, a few of which were highlighted by Tina Rosenberg in her recent New York Times article, “The Benefits of Mobile Health, On Hold”.
In the article, Rosenberg raises a number of important points. She cites, for example, the misalignment between expectations and current realities in mHealth:
“Roughly a decade after the start of mHealth, as the mobile health field has come to be known, these expectations are far from being met. The delivery system is there. But we don’t yet know what to deliver.”
She also highlights the pilot fatigue that has stricken mobile-saturated countries such as Uganda and South Africa, as both public and private sector actors rush to become first-movers in the mHealth space. In some cases this has led to lack of coordination and limited impact.
But there is a silver lining. New research is underway in the mHealth space, and leading actors in are learning from past mistakes to design more effective platforms. Projects such as UNICEF’s Project Mwana have successfully introduced simplicity to a complex health system. And stakeholders are beginning to wake up to the fact that technology is only one part (and often the easiest part) of the equation.
This issue was addressed by Patricia Mechael, executive director of the mHealth Alliance, in the NY Times article: “We can get excited about the shiny new object, but the real impact comes from thinking about the cultural and professional context in which it’s being implemented.” How are mHealth platforms adapting to new realities, and reacting to emergent challenges?
This will be a key point of discussion in our upcoming Mobile Phones for Public Health online certificate course, in which Mechael will speak as a guest expert. The course, which begins next week and runs from June 3 to June 28, already has participants signed up from over 25 countries.
Through case studies, guest expert interviews, multimedia tutorials, interactive exercises and live demonstrations of mHealth tools, the course will showcase how mobile technologies are revolutionizing global health systems – and how various challenges can be overcome. While current mHealth projects may not yet be meeting lofty expectations, they are certainly moving in the right direction.
For even more information about the course, visit the course page or take a look at the syllabus. To make sure you get a seat, fill out an application here and enroll today!
This guest post is by Sara Buzadzhi a past participant in TC309 Mobile Phones for Public Health. Can’t wait for June 3? Sign up for TC105 Mobiles for International Development launching on March 4th, which will feature a week on public health.
While the use of various mHealth applications and text-messaging services are
surging in both high and low-income countries, Russia has been somewhat behind
the curve in adopting these solutions to address health issues. The Russian NGO I
work for, the Health and Development Foundation, has been striving to change that,
introducing the country’s first national mHealth programs.
This January, HDF launched a new nationwide program for clients considering and
undergoing infertility treatment. This initiative, IVF/ART School uses an innovative
-combination of traditional and mHealth approaches. The target audience, women
and their families, will be reached through a multi-tiered approach including offline
seminars with reproductive health specialists at clinics; social networks, a program
site, and regular, interactive webinars online; and text messages to participants’
mobile phones. This comprehensive approach will enable us to maintain a strong
connection with our target audience, each component informing and reinforcing
program messages, and provide them with multiple chances for interaction with
peers and experts.
The demographic situation in Russia has been a point of concern for the government
and the general population since birth rates began to decline in the last decade of
the 20th century. Population increases in the last several years have injected some
optimism into the discussion, but state and public organizations are still eager to
do what they can to promote population growth (including monetary incentives for
pregnant women and mothers).
Against this background, the need for easy access to assisted reproductive
technology treatment for couples dealing with infertility issues is clear. In fact, the
Russian government recently announced that infertility treatment would be covered
under the free state insurance starting in 2013.
But while financial support is important, it is also vital that women and couples
seeking treatment, or considering seeking treatment, are well informed as to their
options, and are receiving the emotional support that can greatly influence the
success of infertility treatment. That is where the IVF/ART School can play a key
role; program participants will receive expert, unbiased information and support
from several sources, including their peer group, increasing the likelihood that they
will maintain treatment until reaching a successful outcome.
HDF’s first national mHealth program was Text4baby Russia, a nationwide maternal
and child health text messaging program that will celebrate its one-year anniversary
this February. Through this program, new and expectant mothers receive
information on caring for their health and the health of their children through free
text messages to their mobile phones. Subscribers receive 1-2 texts per week on topics like nutrition, safety, substance abuse prevention, legal rights, breastfeeding, and more.
Text4baby Russia (SMSmame in Russian) is based on the successful U.S. program
text4baby, but was significantly adapted by HDF and its government and medical
community partners to ensure that the messages meet the specific cultural and
socio-economic needs of its Russian target audience. HDF is currently piloting a
webinar series to address text message topics in greater depth, and plans to launch
the series in early 2013.
We would be happy to hear from any organizations/individuals working in similar
areas, as we have found international collaboration and knowledge sharing (in
forums like the TechChange course we attended, Mobile Phones for Public Health)
to be very helpful in developing and disseminating our work. Follow HDF and their projects on Twitter: @HealthDevtFound @Text4babyRussia @IVFSchoolRussia
