Each month, mPowering Frontline Health Workers partners compile the top five articles, videos, and resources related to mHealth, global health, and technology for development. This month’s "Top Five" post comes from the Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative (GMI), a consortium of over 130 mHealth projects across the JHU ecosystem that enables the University to focus its broad research talent on systems-based challenges of mHealth.
Here are this month’s Top Five resources:
Prioritizing integrated mHealth strategies for universal health coverage. Authors: Garrett Mehl, Alain Labrique
This article presents a framework to systematically visualize health systems barriers that impede access to universal health coverage. It allows public health practitioners and policy makers to frame mHealth innovations as part of a holistic response across the component layers of typical health systems. The framework illustrates how ‘mSolutions’ can integrate into and address constraints across domains of accountability, supply, demand, quality and cost, and it helps to further bridge the sometimes discordant conversation between health systems and mHealth innovators.
Understanding the Role of mHealth and Other Media Interventions for Behavior Change to Enhance Child Survival and Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: An Evidence Review. Authors: Elizabeth S. Higgs, Allison B. Goldberg, Alain B. Labrique, Stephanie H. Cook, Carina Schmid, Charlotte F. Cole, Rafael A. Obregón
This review was generated by a recent USAID Evidence Summit on Under-Five Child Mortality. It summarizes the effectiveness of implementing technological innovations for sustained behavior change at the population level to accelerate progress towards enhancing child survival in low and middle-income countries. The articles included in the review were categorized across four technological domains:, mHealth, social/transmedia, health literacy and devices. Additionally, the article includes policy recommendations for future health programs and best practices for sustained behavior across these four domains.
Containing the Ebola Outbreak – the Potential and Challenge of Mobile Network Data. Authors: Amy Wesolowski, Caroline O. Buckee, Linus Bengtsson, Erik Wetter, Xin Lu, Andrew J. Tatem
This commentary takes an innovative approach at mining ’data exhaust‘generated by mobile phone users in high-risk Ebola-prone areas of western Africa. Population migration and mobility provide critical insights to predict the future spread of epidemics. The authors have developed spatial interaction models that makes use of openly available, deidentified mobile call data records to estimate human mobility patterns and associated travel routes in real-time for improving disaster preparedness and responses, as well as estimating the risk of disease spread. This builds on the group’s exciting work using mobile movement patterns to model other infectious disease risks.
mHealth and Mobile Medical Apps: A Framework to Assess Risk and Promote Safer Use. Authors: Thomas Lorchan Lewis, Jeremy C. Wyatt
The article provides a risk assessment framework to critically examine the use of mobile medical apps in healthcare settings and the associated risk to patient safety. The framework describes various types of risks and key variables influencing the risk, to be taken into account while developing a risk assessment framework. Jeremy Wyatt and colleagues have elegantly developed a two-dimensional figure that helps to combine recommendations for oversight commensurate with the inherent risks of a so-called “medical app”. Read more about various components of the framework in the article.
mHealth Resources to Strengthen Health Programs. Authors: Kelly L'Engle, Laura Raney, and Margaret D'Adamo
This excellent and succinct article compiles a list of resources to advance knowledge on mHealth programs and practice, including: a basic course on mHealth, mHealth Planning guide, mHealth evidence database, and proceedings of the mHealth Working Group meetings. We look forward to the Global mHealth Forum meeting in December 2014, alongside the mHealth Summit, as a unique opportunity to highlight major challenges and opportunities in mHealth worldwide. The authors of this article have played an important role in this convening, a new forum at which members of this expanding ecosystem can exchange experiences, evidence and best practices around mHealth programs and strategies.
Post written by Neelu Singh MPH, MSW, Associate Faculty, Department of International Health, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University/Johns Hopkins Global mHealth Initiative.