News: Digital Health

Two new awards from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will help IntraHealth International improve health workforce information and its use in countries around the world. Many countries suffer from critical shortages of both health workers and data on their health workforces. For countries to achieve universal health coverage and increase access to high-quality family planning, HIV, and other health services, health leaders need to...

According to a report on global mobile trends released by infoDev and the World Bank, three out of four people worldwide have access to mobile phones. This signals great potential for mobile health applications. Mobile health (or mhealth) solutions are among the strategies IntraHealth International already employs in supporting frontline health workers who are combatting HIV/AIDS. In the coming year, we will also be exploring how best to port...

The e-Health Africa Conference 2012: Integrating m-health into e-Health Strategy Implementation is one of the first multi-stakeholder events focusing on e-Health in Africa that will take place on the continent. The conference will identify best practices and lessons-learned from those who are in the process of developing, or have already developed national e-Health strategies. In addition, the conference places a special emphasis on m-health...

The Uganda Medical and Dental Practitioners’ Council (UMDPC) recently launched a new mobile directory, which provides information Ugandans can use to seek health services from qualified health workers at qualified facilities. By combining health workforce data with mobile phone technology, the system also allows council staff and health facility managers to easily verify health professionals’ credentials and cut down on unqualified practitioners...

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog. It is by our Informatics Team Lead, Dykki Settle.Last month, I wrote mHealth: the Possibilities of the Personal about the importance of capitalizing on people’s personal attachments to and investments in their cellphones as a key to making mHealth programs scalable and widely successful. Then I went to Accra, Ghana for the mHealth Africa Summit, which gave me the...

I am only attending the Global Health Council Conference for today, unfortunately, but I was at two great sessions this morning. I'm going to highlight the key points in this post and the next, and I hope my colleagues will pick up where I left off for the remainder of the conference.The first session was called "Transformations: Discovering New Strategies Using Proven Technologies," but it was really all about mobile health (or mHealth, if you...

While Africa has not developed the extensive wired infrastructure of the "Global North," they have managed to leapfrog wired technology to an unprecedented adoption of mobile phones. According to the UN Foundation, fully 64% of mobile users are in the developing world, and 80% of the world’s population now live in an area with mobile coverage. This number will rise to 85% by next year alone. These are the very areas of the world with the majority...