mHealth: A Potential Tool for Health Care Delivery in India

This 9-page document, prepared for the Making the eHealth Connection: Global Partnerships, Local Solutions conference of 2008 in Bellagio, Italy, describes mHealth as "the application of emerging mobile communications and network technologies for health care systems. It involves the use of mobile computing, medical sensors, and communications technologies for health care." The authors describe the potential role mHealth might play, based in part on the example of India, in the new health care delivery model as wireless technology increases in flexibility, popularity, and distribution.

The authors see the same promise for health care in cost-effective, need-based, and appropriate technology that some economists, notably Mohammed Yunus, see for poverty alleviation through the mobile telephone. As stated here, "At present, the total world population served by mHealth services is probably less than one hundred thousand, though 80 percent of the world’s population lives in areas with mobile phone coverage." If the primary aim of mHealth is to strengthen and transform weak health systems, with a goal of moving to new health care delivery models, then it might potentially be able to "make available the right information at the right place, at the right time and in the correct form."