Mobile Health Alliance

As its name suggests, the Alliance is committed to partnership - engaging donors, members, affiliates, and project partners from the public, non-governmental organisation (NGO), academic, and private sectors. Its initial activity will focus on providing:

• Thought leadership to the mHealth sector through: conducting rigorous market research on the size and dynamics of the global mHealth market; presenting the "opportunity for mHealth" by commissioning white papers; undertaking regional conferences and impact studies; and consulting.
• Global advocacy and collaboration in the areas of policies, regulations, interoperability, best practices, and support of relevant mobile and related health standards.
• Partnership for selective implementations in areas such as project design and support, project funding, and driving the public-private collaboration necessary for successful mHealth projects to be nationally and regionally scaled. The Alliance will facilitate regional partnerships and initiatives that improve healthcare in developing countries. These initiatives might, for example, explore text messaging as a means to: improve population awareness about malaria prevention, shape behaviour in ways conducive to preventing HIV/AIDS, support public health data collection campaigns or immunisation campaigns, support consultation and remote diagnosis, communicate with health workers, etc.
  

For example, the Alliance might consider the strategies of a programme in Uganda called Text for Change that uses mobile phones to inform the population about preventative measures to avoid HIV/AIDS. Observing the evaluation statistics showing that the programme has led to a 40% percent increase in people taking HIV tests, the Alliance might conclude that such a system could be used to help deal with the ongoing cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe. By making this connection and creating/strengthening the partnerships needed to support a possible replication of the Text for Change model elsewhere, The Alliance could help spark scalable, sustainable health solutions drawing on the potential of mobile technology. By undertaking such actions as hosting large conferences inviting both the private and public sectors to participate, the Alliance hopes to provoke progress in using mobile and computer technology to help reach the Millennium Development Goals regarding maternal and child mortality and such diseases as HIV/AIDS, malaria, polio, and measles.

Health, Technology.

According to organisers, the developing world is home to 2.2 billion mobile phones and 305 million computers, but only 11 million hospital beds. By accelerating the collection and storage of patient data, training rural professionals, personalising the way patients receive medical treatment, and so on, mHealth can support diagnosis and treatment, and advance education and research in even the most remote and resource-poor environments.

The formation of the Alliance resulted from a July 2008 Rockefeller Foundation-hosted conference on the future of mHealth, in which participants identified the need to increase collaboration in cross-sectoral and pan-regional partnerships to improve healthcare delivery in the developing world.