mHealth in Africa

AFRICACORPORATE

Issue 54 Vol 2 Number 888 2011 www. c o r p o r a t e a f r i c a h e a l t h f o u n d a t i o n . o r g

AFRICA GROWTH STRATEGY REPORT

Building Digital Cities In Africa

Broadband Enables Development Across Africa

ITU Telecom World 2011 Africa

28 Corporate Africa 2011


mHealth in AfricaThe focus should be on turning

mobile health solutions into

mix of involvement from the public and private sectors, including governments.

“Technology is not a magic solution, it is a means for advancing our result, because our main focus should still be on improving processes and management, including capacity building and buy-‐in from local communities,” Aisha stated, based on her

Aisha’s recommendation is worth noting, as there are 450 million Africans who use mobile phones daily for personal and business use. More importantly, the applications for advancing healthcare are very promising. Mobile health, or mHeath, is aimed at integrating mobile phones with Web-‐based software, electronic medical

records, and medical devices in order to reach large sections of the population and help them manage their health.

This is particularly crucial in Africa where there are healthcare resource constraints and a critical lack of health workers. (Africa

diseases but has access to only 3 per cent of health workers.) As long as community health workers have access to mobile phones, they can diagnose disease, track outbreaks, and manage health data from distant places, although, subscription to mobile phones is still below 50 per cent of the population in Africa. One of the main advantages of these new tools relevant to Africa, apart from their availability and their

More than ever, African governments are willing to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to eradicate poverty, enrol all children in primary school,

malaria, and ensure environmental stability by 2015. The use of new communication technologies should be a key innovative approach to accelerate the process.

In this direction, the multiple pilot initiatives have shown that the potential is huge. For example, Short Message Service (SMS)

of health practices and promote disease

communication and medical record keeping. By utilizing the free FrontlineSMS open-‐source software, doctors, and health workers can bypass the expenses of medical care and the logistics of treating patients in remote areas. Another example is EpiSurveyor which is a free phone program to allow health workers to create and use surveys, making compiled digital data more easily searchable. This meets the crucial need for increasing the collection of reliable population data in sub-‐Saharan Africa.

While pilot initiatives are expanding all across Africa, the goal now is to capitalize on the experiences and scaling up. However, questions remain over who will cover

patients, governments, hospitals, insurance providers, or a combination. This discussion is on-‐going in order to highlight how to

mix of public and private involvement. So far, the private sector support for mHealth is mostly limited to charity.

By Therese Lethu, Consultant in Global Health, Europhar, Paris.

29Corporate Africa 2011


Yet PriceWaterhouseCoopers’s Health Research Institute recently estimated that market potential ranged from US$ 7.7 billion to US$ 43 billion annually. However, there is still a vital need to develop clear business models.

As David Aylward, former director of the mHealth Alliance said, “The only mHealth business models that have emerged are for when there is one buyer for a solution to a

Aylward thinks that Sproxil, which provides an anti-‐drug counterfeiting service to pharmaceutical buyers, is a good example. Their customers can easily determine the legitimacy of a drug with a single SMS

Another issue of scaling up is inter-‐operability. A lot of these systems were

need. In order to scale them nationally, the systems need to be re-‐evaluated. Moreover, there should be more regulation and monitoring; a role that organisations such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) might be willing to play, developing new guidelines for mHealth application and devices in response. It could clamp down on

any new mHealth applications and devices if there is a safety risk.

impact on health in Africa. In Eastern regions, such as Tanzania, clinics use mobile payments to send grants to patients to cover transport costs. This has enabled an increasing number of women to come for surgeries. This method is seeing rapid growth as most of the people do not have bank accounts. In Ghana and Liberia, MDNet has networked nearly all physicians via a free doctor-‐to-‐doctor communication network using mobile phones. In this country, the maternal death rate has been lowered thanks to the mobile phones in pilot villages. In addition, the government is currently using these tools to collect data

and monitor the National Health Insurance. Regarding HIV Aids, there are numerous projects going on. In Kenya, health workers send weekly SMS to check on HIV patients instead of conducting home visits. These

than others to have an undetectable level of HIV virus a year after starting treatment. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, UNICEF is using SMS to follow the distribution of 63 million mosquito nets, while in Uganda; they are used to collect disease surveillance data.

From all these mHealth projects, key lessons can be taken for future advances and

the local community; communicate with

sure that the project works towards the community’s wants and needs; to research

successful and those which were not; to build in-‐country partnerships to help the projects to succeed, to set realistic timelines

to bear in mind what Aisha said, that technology is not a magic solution –“it is not the end, but the means for better health results in Africa.”

cover transport costs.

GSMA- mHA Mobile Health Summit

Leaders from both industries, the mobile and health ecosystems, attended the inaugural GSMA-‐ mHA Mobile Health Summit in Cape Town, South Africa, from June 6 to 9, 2011, to discuss strategic and technology advancements in this area. Representing more than 800 mobile network operators and device manufacturers, the GSM Association plays a major role in advancing dialogue between all stakeholders, identifying best practices, and overcoming obstacles. Under the co-‐leadership of GSMA and the mHealth Alliance, this event has been a step forward thanks to the implication of the mobile health ecosystem, including Continua Health Alliance, iHeed and the World Economic Forum. One of the

reinforce the dialogue between public and private sectors, as government experts, regulators, policy makers, and experienced NGOs were actively taking part in the event.

mHealth in Africa

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