Our Work
The mHealth Alliance: Mobilizing Innovation for Global Health
The mHealth Alliance is focused on delivering cutting edge research and guidance on topics that are of critical strategic importance to the overall mHealth ecosystem.
Key areas of thought leadership include sustainable business models, mHealth policy and enabling environments, capacity building and evaluation.
We go beyond white papers to sponsor events both physically and virtually, lead cross-sector mHealth initiatives, and host HUB (www.healthunbound.org), a global online community for resource sharing and collaborative solution generation.
Though there are currently many mobile health success stories, they are typically based on solutions to a single health problem and cannot share data or interact with other applications. This significantly limits their widespread adoption and sustained use. The mHA and its partners are working to establish and promote technological interoperability of mHealth applications and devices. We support open standards-based information and communication technology (ICT) solutions that combine mHealth and eHealth, marrying health care needs with open standards and architecture principles that will allow a range of integrated health services to reach families living in underserved communities.
To accelerate bringing mHealth to sustainable scale, the mHA is working with a select group of countries to engage the various national mHealth stakeholders, including health service providers, insurers, donors, NGOs, academic and research institutions, mobile operators, application developers, and training and certification organizations. By bringing these groups together, we will address in-country issues such as how mobile technology can impact health policy, service quality and delivery, data exchange, capacity building, and reimbursement.
The mHA is also working with partners to achieve the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 - to improve child and maternal health outcomes. Every year, around 343,00 women die as a direct result of childbirth. Pregnancy related mortality extends much further. There are 4 million stillbirths, 3 million early neonatal deaths, and about 7.3 million pregnancy related deaths caused every year by maternal morbidity and improper care during childbirth. Most of these deaths can be prevented.
The mHA’s Maternal-newborn mHealth Initiative (MMI) aims to improve global information-sharing through the use of mobile information technologies in health systems; collaborate to identify and shape mHealth best practices and use-cases; foster sustainable design; and facilitate global information-sharing about the use of mobile technologies to improve maternal-newborn health outcomes. By improving access to family planning, skilled care during pregnancy and childbirth, and emergency obstetric and newborn care, the status of maternal health can improve and the overall health system can be strengthened and extended to all populations.
