mHealth Alliance

mHealth for Frontline Health Workers
Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - 11:35 AM - 12:50 PM

session overview

A key barrier to achieving Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 is the severe shortage of trained frontline health workers, who are the first and often the only link to health care for millions of families in the developing world. They are critical in settings where overall primary health care systems are weak or inaccessible.  Although frontline health workers form the backbone of health systems in these resource-constrained environments, they face numerous challenges: inadequate training, inability to make accurate and timely diagnoses, weak performance incentives, inefficient data for decision-making, difficulty reaching remote populations, a lack of supportive supervision, and an inability to access health information in a timely manner. Mobile technology offers a revolutionary opportunity to strengthen the capacity of frontline health workers and expand the coverage of critical services. This session focuses the efforts aimed at overcoming the challenges around accelerating the use of mobile technology by millions of health workers globally using the mPowering Frontline Health Workers initiative (comprising of ten founding members: USAID, UNICEF, Frontline Health Workers Coalition, Qualcomm, Vodafone, Intel, MDG Health Alliance, GlaxoSmithKline, Praekelt Foundation, and Absolute Return for Kids) as a case in point.

SEssion Objectives

• Understand the value of a cloud-based health content library for Frontline Health Workers 
• Examine sustainable business models around mHealth for Frontline Health Workers
• Explore private and public sector engagement for scaling up mHealth for Frontline Health Workers 

Speakers

 

Sandhya Rao Senior Advisor USAID

Mike Gann Senior Director Intel

Robert Jarrin Senior Director Qualcomm

Erica Kochi Co-Lead UNICEF

Lee Wells Head of Health Programmes Vodafone Foundation