Slashing international health barriers with Skype

Health research is often hampered in surprising ways. For example, international health data on mortality in most of Africa and Asia is based on educated guesswork rather than actual counts. The same goes for live births. And international mental health practice is overwhelmingly based on research of American patients who are only representative of about 5% of the world's population. This despite the suspicion among experts that under-diagnoses of mental illness amounts to an international health epidemic.

Many studies have called for more cross-cultural psychological research, and a doctoral student from the University of Missouri has found a low cost, high value means of doing just that. By focusing the power of Skype to international health, psychology doctoral candidate Reid Trotter was able to conduct extensive research on people in Taiwan. In any international health project, its wise to work with local colleagues, and Trotter spent many months on Skype building relationships that enabled him to use proxies based in Taiwan to gather his data. Trotter's international health colleagues then used the online communications provider to be present at his dissertation defense.

This may seem more like a small step than giant leap in terms of applying technology to international health or education. After all, many of us use Skype to communicate with associates the world over on a daily basis. But health research and academia have been nauseatingly slow to adopt such technologies. For anyone working in higher education today, the use of such a technically basic functionality to overcome the lack of cultural diversity in mental health research is extremely encouraging. These types of technological solutions are so promising precisely because they are high value, and apply a simple solution to a specific problem. And as in this case, they will overwhelmingly be championed by today's students, rather than today's teachers.

Photo credit: The author