mHealth: A Developing Country Perspective

This 9-page document, prepared for the Making the eHealth Connection: Global Partnerships, Local Solutions conference of 2008 in Bellagio, Italy, describes mHealth as one of the major challenges being faced by both medical practice and health care policies. It states that "[a]pproximately 50%–60% of government services including primary health management can be delivered via mobile channel." The document cites examples of the implications of the development of mHealth, such as the need to examine the financing of mobile medical services and the challenge of clarifying the boundaries between physician services and so-called "do-it-yourself" medicine. The authors suggest that mobile providers may offer built-in access features for mHealth provision.

The following is a list of classifications of mHealth by source and destination of the medical information flow:

• Patient to (medical) supervisor
• Patient to physician
• Physician to physician
• Physician to expert system
• Patient to medical customer relationship management (CRM) system (both management of patients and medical interventions)

mHealth systems can be classified as follows:

• mHealth for hospital patients (i.e. moving within prescribed spatial limits)
• mHealth for healthy people (preventive mHealth)
• mHealth for the chronically ill or vulnerable individuals

The document discusses and diagrams current mobile monitoring and diagnosis and discusses the potential evolution of further mobile access for mHealth applications. It includes case studies from South Africa, Indonesia, and India. The authors conclude that the overall development of mHealth will be driven by consumer demand, possibly resulting from value-added service by the mobile phone industry, by health care policy makers, and, possibly, by technological advances in wireless broadband in the near future. "Depending on the policy approach taken, mHealth could either be used to bolster the  overall quality of health care by providing an immediate and reliable source of medical help, it could be used as a cheap surrogate for medical services, or it could be marketed as a value-added service paid for by mobile phone subscribers together with their monthly charges. Clearly, the approach taken will determine whether mHealth reduces inequalities of access to health care services by making services available remotely and free or at low cost, or whether it widens inequalities by being marketed as a luxury for people willing and able to pay for a potentially high-cost additional service."