gmeltdown

During the month of August 2011, one of the many developments in the national Health and ICT scene was the launch of Kenya's National e-Health Strategy 2011-2017. The vision of the strategy is “ To develop efficient, accessible, equitable, secure and consumer friendly health care services enabled by ICT ”. The strategy also outlines a mission to “ promote and deliver efficient healthcare services to Kenyans and consumers beyond our borders, using ICT ”. Hon. Peter Anyang Ngong'o – Kenya's Minister for Medical Services officially launched the strategy on 11th August 2011. Hon. Peter Anyang' Nyongo - Kenya's Minister for Medical Services Calling for a paradigm shift The newly launched strategy seeks to set in motion a process of compensating for the shortage of skilled health care professionals by harnessing ICT for improved healthcare delivery. It also aims to tap into the latent capacity of healthcare consumers to play an active role in the pr...

As the pivot25 competition progresses,  I have been getting curious over the nature of applications coming up in the category for mHealth. I thought to myself that perhaps an analysis of locally existing albeit underutilised mHealth applications will help to manage my curiosity. Useful perspective For some reason a lot of my last 8 years was spent working on information systems to improve community based health services. It is a shame that I did not get myself interested enough in SMS based data collection platforms for health service delivery  until recently. Earlier in the year, while reading through @mberg 's blog post I was even surprised by a prediction to see a lot less discussion about the differences in particular platforms ( CommCare , ChildCount+ , FrontlineSMS:Medic , Mwana , MoTeCH ). I could be excused for my apparently slow uptake of these tools because the Kenyan Health IT scene to which I vainly contributed has over the years been mark-timing. The apparent...