As mobile technology advances and expands, it could change the way
health care is delivered around the globe. Six billion people, or 87 percent of
the world, had mobile subscriptions by the end of last year, up from 5.4
billion in 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
In India alone, the market for
mobile health interventions will be worth $557 million by 2017,
PricewaterhouseCoopers forecasts.
This development has had
investors and aid groups pouring money into mHealth, the practice of using
mobile devices for medicine and public health practices. Earlier this year, for
instance, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation committed $9.9 million
to the mHealth Alliance, founded in 2009 by the Rockefeller Foundation,
Vodafone Foundation and United Nations Foundation. Related networks include the
Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action and TechChange, which offers an online
mHealth certificate course. Research institutions like Johns Hopkins
University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health are adding mHealth courses to
their curriculum.
As the mHealth field grows, it
has now become a common belief that technology will play a growing role in
building health capacity in the developing world. Technology is getting
cheaper, which means that even the poorest citizens are able to access mobile
phones. In addition, the development of low-cost or free open-source software
is spreading. mHealth proponents highlight these factors when explaining why
mobile devices are ideal for improving health care consultations, data delivery
and outcomes.
The Bangladeshi organization
mPower Health is one example of this vision. In February, mPower Health was
awarded a Grand Challenges Canada grant for a mobile phone application aimed at
promoting breast cancer screening among rural women in Bangladesh. The
application works in combination with a two-day training course to help
community health workers educate women about breast health and refer them to a
clinic if an issue needs to be addressed. Findings from a recent study show the
technology can be used to obtain data more accurately than when it is recorded
on paper, reports Mridul Chowdhury, CEO of mPower Health, who has worked with
the United Nations Development Program and the Bangladeshi government.
Another example is Mobile Baby, a
service for pregnant women that is available in Tanzania, Nigeria, the United
Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. It was recognized as the best mobile health
innovation and the best service for women in emerging markets at mobile
operators’ organization GSMA’s Global Mobile Awards this year.
USAID funds more than 40 mHealth
projects in a variety of countries, according to Sandhya Rao, a senior adviser
for private sector partnerships at the U.S. Agency for International
Development’s Bureau for Global Health. But although she says USAID’s
investments in mHealth have increased in the past five years, the
organization’s mHealth activities tend to be embedded within larger projects.
That means it’s difficult to pin down how much USAID actually spends on
mHealth. The agency hired its first overall lead for eHealth, Dr. Adam Slote, a
few months ago.
USAID and other organizations
that aspire to succeed in the mobile health space face two major challenges.
For one, mHealth is a fundamentally interdisciplinary field, and public health
professionals and computer science specialists traditionally don’t communicate
very well with each other. Both areas require technical expertise, and the two
fields don’t always share the same terminology and mode of operations.
“From my standpoint, you’ve
basically got the technologists and the implementers. And they’re not always
having the most open-minded conversations,” says Bill Philbrick, a consultant
for the mHealth Alliance and a former director of the HIV/AIDS, Emerging and
Infectious Diseases Unit at CARE.
Engineers and health
professionals also tend to mingle like oil and water at industry conferences,
according to Philbrick.
“A lot of technology folks will
attend sessions about how people use source code, but that is over the heads of
the implementers,” he says.
Another challenge that faces
mHealth professionals is that, because it is still in infancy, mHealth does not
have a particularly rich history for researchers to mine for best practices.
Also, unlike many other fields, mHealth — since it is so tied to new and
emerging technologies — is moving and developing so rapidly that it can be
tough to pin it down to conduct any kind of evidence-based studies or gauge how
effective it is.
However, this issue is less
pressing for projects in the developing world than it is in the West, USAID’s
Rao notes.
“It’s true that things are
changing very quickly,” she says. “But for the audiences we work with it’s not
that quick… There is still a lot we can do that will still be relevant in a
five-year time span.”
Complications can even arise in
the research phase on mHealth projects. The timetable for a typical computer
science study can be as short as a few months, while a typical health research
project will be significantly longer.
“Part of the reason why computer
science programs move quickly is because tech[nology] moves so quickly,” says
Brian DeRenzi, a computer science and engineering doctoral student at the
University of Washington in Seattle.
While public health researchers
are more accustomed to publishing their new findings in peer-reviewed journals,
computer scientists use conferences as their primary platform for presenting
new research findings, adds DeRenzi, who has conducted research on CommCare and
other health software used in the developing world.
Computer scientists are also
accustomed to measuring project performance through different performance
indicators than those preferred by public health researchers, DeRenzi adds.
Computer scientists may look at how an application can improve patients’
chances of interacting with health workers, while public health specialists
would want to ensure that those interactions actually yielded successful health
outcomes.
The deeper issue has to do with
separating mHealth into its own unique area, according to Jody Ranck, an
mHealth specialist and analyst for GigaOM Pro. That distinction “feels
foolhardy and delusional,” but it’s a broader problem that has affected global
health since donors decided to go with the disease-specific approach in the
1990s, says Ranck, who spent 18 months working with the mHealth Alliance.
“Data should not be in silos, it
should be liquid,” he says. “But donors have yet to embrace that and reward
that perspective.”
Even with the growing number of
opportunities available to improve mHealth, a number of health practitioners
think it’s necessary to draw attention to the limitations. Though some “old
guard” leaders have argued that mobile phones and other technologies “take the
humanity out of humanitarian work,” most mHealth critics take a more measured
position. In a thorough examination of the limits of mHealth, Dr. Sanjay Basu
of the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco
notes that mHealth technologies are “generally concentrated in the hands of
those who already have resources, organized electronic health initiatives, and
motivated and skilled staff.” Basu does not believe mHealth will “generate mass
mortality benefits in the near future.” More likely, he says, “[o]ur joy of
experiencing and creating new technologies may just outpace our need for them,
or direct us towards the most-fun-to-use technologies rather than the most
necessary ones.”
These challenges, however,
shouldn’t dissuade implementers from jumping on the mHealth bandwagon. Donors
are increasingly interested in projects with a mobile component – even if
proposal requests don’t explicitly ask for mHealth to be included.
For implementers, there’s also a
big thirst for projects that add to the mHealth evidence base. From USAID’s perspective,
the big question of the moment is around evidence related to cost
effectiveness. But over the next few years, the focus could shift to
interoperability or creating a set of standards to ensure new technologies are
able to work together.
“If you’re really going to try to
create scale, you have to have systems that talk to each other,” Rao says.
