MoMo Kampala – 25 June – Innovative mHealth Strategies
Posted on: June 19, 2012 – Filed under: Kampala
You are cordially invited to MoMo Kampala’s next meeting on the theme, Can innovative mHealth strategies overcome bottlenecks in delivery of healthcare in Uganda? Hive Colab Monday 25th June, starting 5:30 PM
To ensure healthy outcomes in underserved communities, households need to be able to access essential health, HIV and nutrition information and services for pregnant mothers and their children along with the continuum-of-care. To bridge the access gap to basic healthcare, the Ministry of Health is increasingly reliant upon front-line Community Health Workers to link mothers & their children to the larger healthcare system.
Mobile technologies offer an unprecedented opportunity to address longstanding bottlenecks that have long been a barrier to healthy outcomes. Strategic use of these technologies can solve problems of time, distance and coordination in the delivery of health services. The Ministry of Health and development partners have demonstrated that integrating mobile technologies into health systems can help overcome bottlenecks.
Solving these issues can provide opportunities for linking community health services to the formal health system in underserved and remote communities, and offer the ability to directly target and interact with even the most remote health consumers.
Yet challenges remain. Many of these mHealth initiatives have focused on addressing bottlenecks within a single vertical programme and may not always link to foundational eHealth systems such as DHIS2 (District Health Information Software) being adopted by partner governments. Others lock government into systems that have hidden costs, or require extensive support.
In light of the recent moratorium on new eHealth initiatives in Uganda, we have an unprecedented opportunity to step back and reflect on what guiding principles should be adopted; what support can be provided to the Ministry of Health for developing policies and coordination mechanisms required to guide development partners and the private sector.
Some key questions to consider include:
What is the national vision for contributing effectively to the growing eHealth ecosystem; what guiding principles need to be adopted with regard to governance, ownership, costing, sustainability, piloting and scale-up? What role should the Ministry of Health play in ensuring that newly emerging eHealth tools will fit into an overall scheme of healthcare guidelines, and ensuring that they will be interoperable? What role do institutional capacity building initiatives such as DHIS2 have in mediating healthcare outcomes? How do we empower government to help create an enabling ecosystem that provides a space for innovation and testing, while allowing outside interest groups to assist in mapping the way ahead?
These are some of the issues we will address through our presentations and panel discussions.
For more details and to register visit: http://innovativemhealthstrategies.eventbrite.com/