Global Health & Innovation 2010: m-health

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Global Health and Innovation conference organized by Unite for Sight. Among the numerous excellent presentations and speakers were a cadre addressing the promise of m-health. Some high points:

David Aylward, Director of the UN Foundation's mHealth Alliance, stated that the UN's Millennium Development Goals for health can't be met without using m-health technologies. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has also expressed enthusiasm, saying "the explosion of mobile phone coverage in the developing world provides huge new opportunities, and is beginning to revolutionize medical communication. But in order to take advantage of this we need interoperable eHealth systems."

Aylward touched on implementation with two great points:

1. His organization is spearheading the development of a standardized "back end" platform that would support the inter-operability of numerous independently developed applications. Essentially he seemed to be sketching out an iPhone App Store-like structure, where innovation and independent front-end application development is encouraged, but with enough standardization to make sure they "play-nice" together and with supporting devices.

2. While the accepted global health paradigm sees innovations flow from the global North to the global South, m-health will flip that paradigm. Smart-phone enabled integrated health IT systems for individual care will develop South then move North.

Ashifi Gogo emphasized how "people will pay for value," and that even in the developing world "there are no poor people when it comes to value." His company, Sproxil.com, developed an m-health solution that's countering the $75 billion-a-year counterfeit drug problem. Users scratch to reveal a single-use code on a drug blister pack, then text it to a "fast code" (something like 1111). They then receive a response telling them whether the product is genuine or not, along with additional text, such as a health message or coupon code for a discount on a health product. Much of his development costs were covered by legitimate drug manufacturers whose earnings are threatened by counterfeiters. Launched this year in Nigeria, over a 1 million blister packs carry his codes, and Sproxil.com is on track to earn $1.5 million this year. Good work that's paying well!

Brooke Estin of InSTEDD (Innovative Support for Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters, a Google.org company) told me about the m-health early warning system they are deploying in South-East Asia. InSTEDD has created a network allowing smart phone users to report via text message potential disease outbreaks, or other emergent health disasters. Alerts are overlaid on Google Earth to provide real-time mapping. As with other crowdsourced surveillance systems, a single report may be nothing, but a flurry is worth investigating. A week earlier a relief worker back from Haiti had expressed indignation that post-earthquake assessments used World Food Program helicopters to conduct $3000-per-hour fly-overs. The same information could have been gathered for free by cell phone if only there were pre-established networks and protocols. As with most m-health solutions, InSTEDD's innovative concept has potential uses spanning the spectrum of global health.

Photo Credit: The author