How Mobile Phone Technology Can Fight Maternal Mortality

This article from the UN Dispatch of the United Nations Foundation contains Fabiano Teixeira da Cruz's preview remarks for a conference panel discussion on “Mobilizing Reproductive Health: How Cell Phones Are Revolutionizing Women’s Health”. The panel was presented at the Women Deliver 2010 conference, June 7-9, Washington, DC, United States. The conference was organised by the mHealth Alliance, which the Rockefeller, UN, and Vodafone Foundations launched in 2009 to facilitate cross-sector collaboration to bring mHealth to sustainable scale.

Teixeira da Cruz opens with global maternal mortality statistics and then turns the focus to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), where the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) - the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births - varies from 21.1 women in Chile to 582.5 in Haiti. The causes cited here include: poor access to healthcare; low rates of antenatal coverage; difficulties in communicating with providers in emergencies; no access to lab work; and no health care-related information easily available. Information and communication technology (ICT), as stated here, holds the promise of a paradigm shift through "digital healthcare....It can, among other things, enable healthcare workers to conduct remote consultation and diagnosis, store and disseminate healthcare information, improve access to and use of information by patient, strengthen epidemiological surveillance and management, establish databases to track vaccination, raise awareness through knowledge sharing, improve quality of health services provision, improve patient compliance with treatment regimen, improve access to health services, expand access to ongoing medical education and training for health workers."

Mobile technology offers access to more than 5 billion subscribers (forecast by the end of 2010), as compared to access offered by 1 billion personal computers. "The key applications for mHealth (defined as the use of mobile communications for health services and information) in developing countries are:

• Education and awareness
  
• Remote data collection
  
• Remote monitoring
• Communication and training for healthcare workers
  
• Disease and epidemic outbreak tracking
  
• Diagnostic and treatment support
  
• Appointment reminders (to patients and workers)"
  

Teixeira da Cruz concludes that ICT in healthcare is part of a larger systemic need. "Health system strengthening as a whole is the key to the success of any kind of mHealth intervention....We need clinical and public health experts to explain the needs and challenges they face; then gather the ICT experts to find the points of intersection - where ICT can help along the continuum of care for pregnant mothers and newborn children, and for those with serious diseases."