While mobile geeks and tech pundits everywhere debate whether version 2.4 of the Android operating system will be called “Ice Cream” or “Ice Cream Sandwich” (hasn’t anyone bothered to ask David Lee Roth?), my guess is that people on the front lines of mobile healthcare are more excited about things like the smartphone-based ECG. I’m betting that this is true not only in the West, but in less developed parts of the world.
As I’m often inclined to do, I’d like to draw your attention to how people are employing mobile phones to improve the delivery of health services in Africa.
“In the developed world, people pay for the apps to help manage their various health ailments such as diabetes,” reports Kenya-based Business Daily Africa. “However, in Africa the technology is mainly on designing healthcare products or data collection applications to support healthcare.”
There’s a good bet that you knew that already. After all, there are more than 5 billion mobile phones in use worldwide, and most of them are not smartphones. Nearly all have text capability, though.
Kenyan doctoral student Shikoh Gitau developed a text-based application to remind HIV/AIDS patients to take their medications. “So although they may not be prominent, and some might be very academic, m-health applications do exist and are slowly having some effect on health service or in the very least health information delivery in the continent,” she tells Business Daily.
Text messaging is relatively simple technology and it’s been shown to be effective in remote, resource-poor parts of the world. But advanced smartphone platforms are finding their way to Africa, too.
Business Daily reports that health workers in South Africa are carrying “data enabled” phones to the homes of HIV patients, while their counterparts in Uganda can transmit public-health data over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and infrared—the latter being ancient technology that harkens to the PDA’s heyday, circa 2000—to health clinics and then over a LAN to a central server. “The correct prognosis is then sent back to the clinicians,” the publication says.
To me, that sounds an awful lot like mobile clinical decision support. And to think hundreds of thousands of physicians in the U.S. are struggling to implement a single CDS protocol—either fixed or mobile—in order to achieve “meaningful use.”
I’m not going to suggest that Uganda has a more advanced healthcare system than the United States, but someone there has figured out mobile clinical decision support. That alone ought to show the promise of mobile health—and hopefully motivate a few American clinicians to move out of the Stone Age.
