Mhealth Initiatives: A Case Study

It is believed that mHealth has the capacity to leverage all six WHO’s defined health building blocks; service delivery, health workforce, health information system; essential medical products and technologies; health financing; and leadership and governance. ([16]WHO, 2007& [17]2010) According to this Organization, a well functioning health system should be able to improve population health by addressing health issues in an affordable and timely manner. [17](WHO,2010) mHealth initiatives have the potential to influence the health system functions in several ways. For instance health service delivery can be facilitated through use of text messaging to remind patients of their upcoming medical appointments or to monitor health complications remotely.

([18]Chib & Chen, 2011; [19]Ganapathy & Ravindra, 2009; [20]Mahmud et al.,2010) also mobile health applications are able to; enhance health workers reach out to patients in remote areas, support effective and accurate data collection through sophisticated registry systems, keep health workers up to date regarding diseases and new treatments [21](Noordam et al., 2011) and provide them with opportunities to receive feedback on the quality of their services and help them to improve their performance based on the feedbacks that they receive from physicians back in primary health care centers.[20](Mahmud et al., 2010) In other words, mobile health technologies is able to connect patients and health care workers to the point of care services regardless of temporal and geographic barriers and this is especially appealing to the low and middle income countries where care access points are distant and traveling between the residence and the clinic can be expensive, time consuming, challenging for patients and damaging to the environment . ([22]USAID, 2014; [23]Tomlinson 2013)