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In rural areas of the developing
world, mobile telephones are helping people connect with health care providers
in major cities. For instance, today a woman in Uganda having a difficult
childbirth can get help from a physician in Kampala, contact a community health
worker, or even secure transportation to a hospital.
“Now, a phone call can compress the
time that it would have taken before to come to that decision point and get the
woman care more often and quickly,” said Dr. Alain Labrique, a professor of
international health and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
JHU’s Global mHealth Initiative is
evaluating the role of mobile technology for care in 51 projects involving 120
students and more than 60 faculty members. Next March, JHU’s Bloomberg School
of Public Health will start two courses on using these technologies in the
field.
“There’s a lot of excitement among
faculty, but there’s 10 times as much excitement coming from students,”
Labrique said. “What mobile technologies are doing is changing the way that we
see global health in terms of our ability to impact populations, to collect
data in real time, to develop real strategies, to impact public health that we
hadn’t thought of before.”
JHU’s Dr. Larry Chang, who studied
HIV/AIDS and technology in Uganda, and Labrique both agree on the need to
rigorously evaluate the potential of such tools. In addition, greater patient
access to care would require a larger capacity to absorb the extra workload,
such as more health workers, Labrique said.
The Friends of AIDS Foundation is
dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and
empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV
virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.
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