The Ghana Health Service has been implementing a project called Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH) that has been developing a mobile health information technology system to increase the quality and availability of maternal health care, with a focus on the continuum of care. The project seeks to provide information to mothers and community health workers via mobile phones.
Although the project is still underway, Dr. Koku Awoonor-Williams was able to present some of the preliminary lessons they have learned over the course of the project. Many of these lessons have been echoed in other sessions at the mHealth Summit and should be considered by anyone attempting to implement an mhealth project in a low resource setting.
- Voice messages may be preferable to SMS
- Women may lack access to mobile phones that are “family” phones
- Phone “literacy” may be low
- Electricity, connectivity, and network congestion issues in remote areas
- Data entry can be more cumbersome depending on the type of phones used and can lead to incomplete data sets
- Buy-in from managers and supervisors of community health workers is critical
For more information, visit MoTeCH’s website.