Latest Updates | K4Health’s mHealth Practice

Latest Updates

• ACE for Android: ACE is K4Health's new mobile Application for Contraceptive Eligibility. ACE helps healthcare workers select appropriate contraceptive methods for their clients, based on a series of medical eligibility questions.
• mHealth Toolkit: The Toolkit of the mHealth Working Group has been freshly updated. The mHealth Toolkit features practical resources on using mHealth approaches for behavior change communication, data collection, healthcare provider training, and more.
• Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers is now available for e-readers and other mobile devices, in addition to in print and online. Kindle and EPUB versions are available from our Publications & Resources page. Learn more about the Handbook at www.globalhandbook.org.
• mHealth Fact Sheet: The Knowledge for Health Project: Focus on mHealth (1MB .pdf) is a two-page overview of K4Health's mHealth activities, including  more information about K4Health mHealth projects in Malawi and Bangladesh.

K4Health’s mHealth Practice

One of K4Health’s growing practice areas is mHealth—the use of mobile technologies (most commonly mobile phones) to support medical and public health practices. mHealth is of particular interest in developing countries, where widespread cellphone availability brings communications to areas where telephone lines may never have existed, and to people whose speed of knowledge exchange until recently may have been limited to the speed they could walk.

K4Health's core expertise—knowledge management (KM) for public health—is a natural match for mHealth. One informal definition of KM is "the art and science of getting the right information to the right people, at the right time, in the right format.” mHealth as a set of tools and approaches can help immensely in doing just that.

K4Health is involved in many facets of the growing mHealth conversation, including:

• Spearheading an interdisciplinary mHealth Working Group to share best and emerging practices;
• Creating (and continually updating) the mHealth Toolkit, which provides access to key mHealth resources;
• Implementing mHealth components (such as text messaging/SMS health campaigns, and using mobile phones to support community health workers) within our field-based programs, where appropriate; and
• Developing mobile applications and interfaces to make K4Health's content available on mobile devices.

Learn more: Read the Focus on mHealth Fact Sheet (1MB .pdf).

Image credit: Medic assists community health workers with mobile phone usage during FrontlineSMS training at St. Gabriel's Hospital in Namitete, Malawi. (c) 2008 Josh Nesbit, courtesy of Photoshare.