May 5th 2010: eConference on the Use of Mobile Technologies for Improving Family Planning and Maternal and Newborn Health Services

Strengthening Health Outcomes through the Private Sector (SHOPS) and mHealth Alliance are holding a free online conference this Wednesday (May 5th) to discuss how mobile technologies can improve family planning and maternal and newborn health services in developing countries.

The conference will include live discussions with mHealth leaders on a variety of topics including strengthening community health workers; open source trends and implications; and gender, phones and reproductive health. The themes of the three panel discussions will be mHealth interventions along the continuum of care, mHealth applications addressing different stakeholder needs, and cross-cutting mHealth issues.

Click here to view the conference schedule and to register as a participant.

Click here for a March 13 post on this conference with additional background information.

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Ten Technologies that are Empowering Women Across the Developing World

Tom Watson, author of  CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World, writes about ten technologies, both high and low tech, that are empowering women across the developing world—and several have the potential to directly improve maternal health.

The Daily Beast

Among the technologies Watson writes about are safe birthing kits with soap, a plastic sheet, a razor blade and string (pretty low-tech!); E-Learning to train and certify 20,000 nurses in Kenya by 2011; and text messaging/social networking platforms for communities to discuss and push for change on issues like female genital cutting and early marriage.

Read the full story, Technologies that Empower Women.

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Free eConference Series: How Can Mobile Phone Technologies Improve Family Planning, Maternal and Newborn Services in the Developing World?

A March 6th, 2010 post on Global Health Ideas provides info on an upcoming e-conference on the use of mobile technologies to improve family planning and maternal and newborn health services in developing countries.

Global Health Ideas

Online Conference May 5, 2010

“The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Strengthening Health Outcomes through the Private Sector (SHOPS) Project is launching an annual eConference to advance private sector innovations in the sustainable provision and use of quality family planning/reproductive health and other health information products and services. The theme of the 20l0 eConference is mHealth which is the use of mobile technology to improve health program effectiveness and efficiency.

The SHOPS Proiect and the mHealth Alliance invite you to submit an abstract by March 17, 2010 to present at this online conference which will focus on how mobile technologies can improve family planning, maternal and newborn services in the developing world…”

For more info, read the full post, USAID, mHealth Alliance Online Conference May 5th, 2010, on Global Health Ideas. 

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Ghana: Improving Maternal Health via Mobile Technology

The Grameen Foundation, Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the Ghana Health Service are working together on a project called Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH). This joint initiative, funded by the Gates Foundation,  is exploring how to best use mobile phones to increase quality and quantity of maternal and neonatal health services in Ghana.

MobileActive.org

“…For example, a woman might come in for a health check-up when she’s 12 or 14 weeks pregnant, at which point she would be registered into the MoTeCH system. She would then be on track to receive two kinds of messages: informative texts and action texts. The informative texts simply tell the parents what to expect (i.e., developmental stages) during a pregnancy, while the action texts encourage parents to make clinic visits based on their personal histories (such as needs for shots or follow-up appointments).

The other target audience of MoTeCH is community health workers who provide the vast majority of primary care in much of the developing world. The workers use mobile phones to enter data such as when they have seen a patient and what kind of treatment these patients received. Data is then compiled to more easily track patients.

The idea behind MoTeCH is to link the two systems so that the messages can be more specifically targeted and tailored to the needs of the individual parents; for example, if a pregnant woman misses a tetanus shot, the community health workers’ records will show how many weeks along she is and she can be easily sent a reminder. Similarly, messages can be sent to village community health workers alerting them to patients who are in need of specific services in order to locate the patient and encourage him or her to get treatment. ‘It gets community health care workers out of the clinic and seeking patients who need care a little bit more immediately,’ said Wood…”

Read the full story here.

For more info on the subject, take a look at Dying for Cell Phones (Literally).

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