Mobile phones are now ubiquitous technology. Smartphone or not, penetration is high, and for some years now, their use in the delivery of healthcare has been explored.
On Saturday, stakeholders, NGOs and medical professionals got together at IIT-Madras to discuss the advantages and challenges of using mobile technology in healthcare, or m-health.
At the national consultation, organised by the Centre for Technology and Policy, IIT-M in collaboration with the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, experts said that while there were many benefits – both to patients and providers — there continued to be hiccups which needed to be sorted out.
Nirmala Murthy of Project DRISTHI in Bangalore said they used tablets to enable healthcare workers to store records. While there were some functional complaints about the app, research showed that the outcomes were much better once the they started using them, she said.
Pilot project
In Kathalampet, Vellore district, the Rural Technology and Business Incubator implemented a pilot project where pregnant mothers would receive advisories via voice calls in Tamil during their pregnancy and once their child was born.
The calls would also collect feedback, by posing questions and getting answers through an automated voice response system. If there was an adverse event reported, an SMS would alert the doctor.
“We realised that frontline healthcare workers were crucial to this – as they got the pregnant mothers registered and also told us about any hitches in the system,” said Deapica Ravindran of the Incubator.
What is needed, said Kartik Kalyanram, a doctor at the Rishi Valley Rural Health Centre, is simple, robust handheld devices with embedded systems, and possibly cloud storage.
NGOs and medical professionals discussed the advantages and challenges of using mobile technology in healthcare or m-health
