Mobile HIFA (mHIFA)

This report has been prepared for HIFA by Dr Geoff Royston, one of mHIFA’s expert advisers, with advice and assistance from other members of the mHIFA Working Group. It draws from, and builds on, a previous publication: Ensuring that mHealth applications provide essential healthcare information for citizens in low resource settings (2015).

Geoff Royston (Adviser, mHIFA) Healthcare Information For All? Assessing mobile healthcare information applications for citizens in low-resource settings. (Poster presented at Appropriate Healthcare Technologies for Low Resource Settings - AHT2016, Oxford, UK, 5-6 September)

Many of us have been highly impressed by the work of organisations such as Medical Aid Films, Global Health Media Project, SAWBO and others involved in the production of video health content. With this in mind, the Mobile HIFA Working Group (which is dedicated to issues of mobile phone-based healthcare information for citizens, parents and children) carried out a survey of video content producers. The survey was implemented by Laura Wright (Masters in Library and Information Science student) and lecturer Dr Chris Hagar, both of the San Jose State University (USA). (HIFA now has a substantial track record of working with academia in this way - please contact us for details.)

In July 2016 we brought together several producers of health video content to discuss the results of the mHIFA survey and ways forward. Laura Wright opened the meeting with a presentation of the results. The notes of the subsequent discussion are available here

Geoff Royston, Christine Hagar, Lesley-Anne Long, Dennis McMahon, Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Nand Wadhwani on behalf of the mHIFA Working Group (Mobile Healthcare Information For All). The Lancet Global Health, Volume 3, No. 7, e356–e357, July 2015

Citizens in low resource settings need basic healthcare information to prevent and manage disease and injury. In these settings, people may have little or no access to health eduction, and little or no access to a health worker in case of need, and therefore basic information is even more important. The use of mobile communication in these settings is growing hugely, opening up a wide range of actual or potential health related uses of mobile phones, not least the opportunity for major advances in the provision of essential - often life-saving - practical information about health and healthcare to the poorest 2 billion of the world's population. 

A presentation at the Global mHealth Forum, Washington DC, 12 November 2015,  delivered by Nand Wadhwani on behalf of the mHIFA Working Group. 

This overview focuses particularly on applications of mHealth to provide information about health and health care for the public, patients, lay carers and health professionals. Geoff Royston, September 2014 (PDF, 1Mb)

Dr. Christine Hagar, an assistant professor at the San José State University (SJSU) School of Library and Information Science, addressed the Healthcare Information For All by 2015 (HIFA2015) mHealth goal (mHIFA) during a poster showing at the 2014 BOBCATSSS conference in Barcelona. She explained the need for mobile access to healthcare information at the point of need in low-income countries where healthcare workers may not be available. 

(Mobile) Healthcare Information For All By 2015: Preliminary findings and future direction
Information Development 32(3) · September 2014 
DOI: 10.1177/0266666914550493

Abstract: This paper reports on the Mobile Healthcare Information For All By 2015 (mHIFA) initiative led by the Health Information For All 2015 (HIFA2015) 2012-2015 Challenge Working Group. It discusses the preliminary findings of a scoping exercise to identify global current, completed and planned projects that use mobile phones to provide healthcare information, particularly maternal, child and first-aid, in low- and middle-income countries, that appear to be aligned to the mHIFA Goal. Despite a plethora of mHealth projects on a wide range of mHealth topics, only nine projects were closely related to the mHealthcare Goal. Findings of the scoping exercise were made available on the HIFA2015 Discussion Forums to instigate feedback from key healthcare and telecom stakeholders. An assessment tool was created to help telecom providers and potential providers to assess relevance to the mHIFA Goal.