mHealth information for all: a global challenge
15-Jul-15, The Lancet Global Health
Access to health-care information for citizens is a key determinant to reach both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the emerging post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, but this challenge has repeatedly been relegated to the sidelines. What might kickstart progress? An obvious candidate is the mobile phone, which is becoming ubiquitous in low-income and middle-income countries.
%20United%20Nations%20Foundation.jpg "MHealth information for all a global challenge (c) United Nations Foundation")
Image: United Nations Foundation
It is vital that citizens in these countries have access to actionable health-care information, largely because they typically have no access to trained health workers.
We recently commissioned a survey of 1700 mHealth projects. Our findings showed that none of these services provided essential, actionable, offline guidance for direct use by citizens addressing the range of acute health-care situations commonly encountered in low-resource settings, and very few provided any such content at all.
There is clearly a huge and growing opportunity for citizens to have healthcare information on their phones, available offline as and when they need it. Up to now, this opportunity has been constrained by three challenges:
- Most mobile phones in low-resource settings are basic phones that can accommodate only voice and SMS text messaging with no internet connectivity or multimedia capability.
- There is a shortage of appropriate content. A few non-profit organisations are producing open-access audio and video content in local languages. There is, however, little investment in such content and there is a risk that the pharmaceutical industry and infant nutrition companies will take advantage of this gap to promote their own products, with potentially disastrous consequences.
- How to place the content onto individual phones? We believe the ideal approach is for handset manufacturers to preload health content onto mobile phones at the time of manufacture, in the same way that games and other content are currently made freely available. Content can also be made available on micro-SD cards.
We call on content providers, mobile phone manufacturers, network operators, application developers, and international health organisations to collaborate to empower citizens in low-resource settings with essential health care information.