PEPFAR Gets In On Mobile Health

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-11-03 10:39:00 UTC
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mHealth is big these days. As the public health debate rages in the USA and the conversation around global health grows in the general consciousness, the idea of using mobile devices to help improve the quality, speed, and convenience of care is becoming increasingly important. In a keynote at last week's mHealth Summit, the US Coordinator for AIDS Relief Ambassador Eric Goosby announced that the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) would be joining the mHealth Alliance.

The alliance was first announced earlier this year at the GSM World Mobile Congress as a partnership between the United Nations Foundation, Vodafone Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Like all "alliances," the mHealth Alliance is an evolving platform that will theoretically do some combination of best practice sharing, support for scaling, and cross-sector partnership building.

From the folks I've talked to, there is a lot of tempered optimism around this. PEPFAR is a major funder that can add significant direction and momentum to the field. The influx of resources could reduce competition and provide new incentives for collaboration that can take what are currently mostly niche applications of very promising tools and help them scale in new ways.

At the same time, some have questions about how different approaches to development will gel together. On the one hand there is the small, networked, let people use tools how they will ethos. On the other is the sort of top down, comprehensively planned intervention that government agencies traffic in. Beyond that, mobile is fast and rapidly evolving while bureaucracy moves painfully slow. Of course, there is always room for balance.

For more on the announcement, check out the full press release here.

Photo: DavidDennisPhotos.com

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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