Mobile phone apps aim to improve health care in the developing world

Sindya Bhanoo — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:12:11 -0500

A Massachusetts-based company is hoping to revolutionize healthcare in developing countries with mobile phone applications.

Dimagi, a for-profit company started by MIT Media Lab alums, plans to release a new mobile application called CommCare within the next two months. The application lets community workers refer patients for treatment, fill out questionnaires about patient health and send real-time information back to doctors at health clinics.

Dimagi is launching the application in Tanzania where health workers will use it to collect data as they make patient rounds in rural parts of the country.

"Right now data is not collected, and it's hard to see where resources are going," Jonathan Jackson, CEO of Dimagi told The Industry Standard. "This is real-time monitoring."

The application will work on any mobile phone that can run Java. Inputted data is transmitted either over a wireless or cellular network. However, phones that can run Java currently cost $100 or more, Jackson said.

Dimagi and other companies are trying to leverage an interesting fact: Developing countries with poor healthcare systems often have a booming mobile phone user base. Users in developing countries account for about one-third of the world's 4 billion mobile subscribers, an article in Fortune Magazine reported.

Prabhjot Singh Dhadialla, a program director at the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at Columbia University's Earth Institute, told Fortune that "mobile phones are helping developing countries to be on the cutting edge of health systems throughout the world."

In addition to applications, there are also hardware-based efforts that may be able to tackle healthcare needs in the developing world. Last month, The Industry Standard reported on a group of UCLA researchers who have created a prototype device that can be attached to a mobile phone and run medical tests to help determine whether a patient might have HIV or malaria.