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Do m-Health Tools Really Work? Testing The Impact of Mobile Technology on Maternal and Child Health Care

Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Mar 01, 2012

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Do m-Health Tools Really Work? Testing The Impact of Mobile Technology on Maternal and Child Health Care data sheet 3524 Views

(The following case study was written by Kate Otto of The World Bank; it is reprinted here with permission.)

With the proliferation of innovative mHealth tools across the developing world, there comes an inspiring enthusiasm for health system reform. But mHealth raises a critical question as well: how do we know mHealth tools are actually changing health outcomes for the better?

I work with the World Bank and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia on the evaluation of an mHealth intervention that enables rural community health workers to improve the quality and reach of their maternal and child health care services. We have set out to see if this tool is just a very cool device, or if it actually improves maternal health and decreases maternal and infant mortality.

You may be used to reading about the development and testing of mHealth tools aimed at scaling up to farther-reaching implementation. Our work, however, is a bit different: we built a tool on which we will do no further development, and instead rigorously test the impact of this tool on health outcomes of rural mothers and children through a randomized evaluation.

Basically, we are searching for hard evidence first, and leave a discussion of scale-up for once we have the data.

Since our final results will not be available until early 2013, I’ll share with you today a bit about our research design and the key question we are investigating: Does the use of a mobile phone-based tool for patient registration, appointment reminders, and inventory management in the hands of community health workers result in improved maternal and child health outcomes in a rural Ethiopian setting?

Basic Information
Website URL: 
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSIT...
Organization involved in the project?: 
The World Bank
Project goals: 

The study researched whether an m-Health intervention would enable rural community health workers to improve the quality and reach of their maternal and child health care services. The goal of the study was to build a tool to rigorously test the impact of the use of mobile technology on health outcomes of rural mothers and children through a randomized evaluation.

Brief description of the project: 

The project tested how mobile technology could aid health workers with maternal and child health, focusing on three main areas of care:

1. Improving antenatal care and delivery services
2. Improving vaccination coverage
3. Facilitating emergency referrals

To test the efficacy of the tool, the team randomly selected three different groups of Health Extension Workers to see how using mobile technology affected their work. The first group all received mobile phones equipped with software to help with improving antenatal care, vaccination coverage, and emergency referrals. The second group received both the software-equipped phones (for the Health Extension Workers) and dumbphones (for Volunteer Community Health Workers) – the dumbphones were only able to make "missed calls." The control group did not receive mobile phones at all.

The study then followed how well each group was able to deliver on the three goals.

Target audience: 

The target audience is researchers, policy makers, and anyone designing mobile health interventions.

Detailed Information
Length of Project (in months) : 
12
Status: 
Ongoing
What worked well? : 

The results of the study have not yet been released, as the main focus is currently on the testing process and why this kind of research matters.

What did not work? What were the challenges?: 

The results of the study have not yet been released, as the main focus is currently on the testing process and why this kind of research matters.