ICTworks by Inveneo

Grameen Foundation is a global non-profit organization based in Washington DC. Since 2000, Grameen Foundation has recognized the important role mobile phones play in the fight against global poverty. Starting with its Village Phone program, Grameen Foundation has played a leading role in developing mobile phone solutions that address the unique needs of the poor and poorest populations.

The Deputy Project Director will be responsible for leading the day-to-day management of the Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH) implementation in Ghana. The project is a partnership between Ghana Health Service and Grameen Foundation which aims to use mobile phones to increase the quantity and quality of antenatal and neonatal care in Ghana. The Deputy Project Director will lead the expansion of this program to three new districts with funding from two new donor grants. Responsibilities include devising and implementing a project plan, managing the field and call center teams, managing budget, tracking and reporting results, developing technical and operational processes suitable for scale, defining and overseeing implementation plans, and making decisions regarding immediate and long term technical needs. The Deputy Project Director will also work closely with the MOTECH management team to develop and execute sustainability plans and business models while building and cultivating relationships with a range of partners such as Ghana Health Service, telecommunications providers and development partners. The Deputy Project Director will support the Country Director by providing input into strategic decisions and helping to define the long term vision for MOTECH in Ghana and beyond.

More details:
http://www.interviewexchange.com/jobofferdetails.jsp?JOBID=29051&PREVIEW
http://www.grameenfoundation.applab.org/section/ghana-health-worker-project

Some of the top organizations and corporations working in the mobile technology and health space will gather December 5–7 at the mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C. The summit program offers several tracks and a wide range of sessions and exhibits for just about anyone interested in mobile technology and health.

As a practitioner working in rural settings or implementing programs in developing countries you may be attending the mHealth Summit in hopes of connecting with others working in similar situations and facing comparable challenges. You might be looking for an opportunity to share and learn from peers who implement mHealth programs on the ground. Or you may be seeking ways of resolving the kinds of difficulties that won’t be highlighted during official presentations.

In that case, stop by the “Reality Booth” (number 131) for your daily dose of real. Innovative business models are great. New behavior change communication technologies open huge opportunities. Mobile tools to help health professionals build capacity to improve healthcare systems sound like a dream come true. But what happens during implementation? What are the real life barriers and challenges that practitioners face when implementing programs with an mHealth component? Where can you get some honest answers?

The Reality Booth will host a number of expert mHealth practitioners on a revolving schedule. Stop by between 11 am and 7 pm to discuss the realities of implementation with some of the leading mHealth practitioners from around the globe.

The Reality Booth is co-hosted by MCHIP, USAID's flagship maternal, newborn and child health program, and Plan International USA, one of the oldest and largest children's development organizations in the world, and co-coordinated by James BonTempo of Jhpiego and Linda Raftree of Plan International USA.

Recently leaders from the United Nations Foundation (UNF) and Vodafone Foundation gathered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. to discuss their projects and key lessons learned after nine years of working together in partnership.  The discussion focused on the broader implications for other public-private-partnerships (PPPs) hoping to contribute to global development.

Drawing on the “Mobilizing Development” report of the partnerships efforts, UNF CEO Kathy Calvin stressed that the partnership slowed down project implementation, at least initially, but made for greater efficiency and long-term impact.  Discussions about how to orchestrate the partnership lasted two years, and it took another two years to decide on the actual projects that the partnership would complete, she stated.

William Kennedy, a senior official from the United Nations Office for Partnerships in New York, discussed the “cultural divide” between business and development.  “I don’t think you can underestimate the effort it takes to bridge the cultural divide between a big company and a foundation.” 

One example is the business mindset to immediately scale projects as large as possible, as opposed to the development mentality of respecting local culture and adapting solutions for particular communities.  He added that what makes this partnership different from other less successful development PPPs are the relationships between the leaders on each side.  Also, they had consistent evaluations of the development projects, which was important in business culture.  Leaders were willing to address the UNF’s needs and shortcomings, and to make extra efforts to complete the work.

Members of the audience voiced questions about the “shared value” and motivations for each organization to partner with the other.  Vodafone had recently bought other telecommunications companies, becoming a global brand right before its partnership with the UN.  Before partnering with the UN on this philanthropic initiative, Vodafone was able to attach its own brand to the UN’s global appeal. 

Other UNF leaders, however, voiced their concerns with this opinion, stating that Vodafone officials took particular care to separate business and philanthropic motivations, citing their willingness to allow service providers to run mHealth initiatives set up by the program as evidence of their philanthropic motivations in their efforts with the UNF.

As for the future of PPPs hoping to meet global development goals, Calvin expressed her opinion that the age of partnerships between one private company and one public organization is coming to an end.  Instead, she said that what the UNF is learning is that alliances, made up of a variety of government, private, and non-governmental organizations, are the future of philanthropy. 

She pointed to the formation of the mHealth alliance, which stemmed from the original UNF-Vodafone partnership, but currently is able to increase scale and efficiency as an alliance with other organizations contributing to different aspects of the program.

I am Andrew J. Dupree, and in the developing world, many people die every day due to lack of access to basic medical measurements, such as blood pressure, and corresponding diagnoses. In order to combat this, a medical diagnostic platform is being designed which will use low-cost sensors and utilize the proliferation of mobile phones in emerging regions for computational power.

Broadly speaking, the Mobile Phones as a Medical Diagnostic Platform project can be divided into an electronics phase and a software phase. The electronics phase involves selecting a suitable pressure sensor, amplifying its output, and modulating the signal for transmission to the phone. The software phase involves demodulating the signal, calculating the blood pressure, creating a GUI for the phone targeted for the regions in which it will be deployed, and creating a database with basic diagnostic information correlated to the blood pressure calculated.

A chief design difficulty in this project has been the implementation of amplitude modulation (necessary to transmit DC information to the mobile phone) on the 3.2V provided by the phone battery. An analysis of the standard modulation IC, ON Semiconductor’s MC1496 balanced modulator, is presented, along with modifications and design decisions that demonstrate optimized operation for low-power, DC input, and minimal harmonics.

The first SMS, or “text” message, was sent over Vodafone’s network in December 1992. By most accounts, it read simply “Merry Christmas.” Using just fifteen of the permitted 160 characters, it was an appropriately succinct beginning to what is today by far the most widely used data service worldwide. By one estimate as many as 7 trillion SMS messages will be sent globally in 2011.

Smart Connect sensor

SMS’s reach and reliability, combined with its popularity among users, make it particularly attractive to those working on applications for the developing world, where Internet and smart phones are not yet widely available or affordable.

Open source SMS messaging platforms – RapidSMS, FrontlineSMS and others – and rapidly falling prices are fueling an SMS innovation explosion and fostering new thinking about how SMS can be leveraged for non-mobile applications.

Enter Smart Connect, a “communication appliance” developed by PATH and Inveneo which uses SMS to improve the reliability and performance of one of the most important systems in all of global health: the medical “cold chain.” First, though, a little bit on why the cold chain matters.

The Cold Chain

Few if any interventions compare with vaccination as a way to improve human health.

Famously, in the decade from 1967 to 1977, the World Health Organization (WHO) lead a global vaccination campaign against smallpox and, in 1979, officially declared that the disease had been eradicated. The Polio vaccine has come close to this mark, reducing the global incidence of this scourge by over 99% worldwide, and new vaccines for Malaria, HIV and more obscure diseases are in the works.

All told, the WHO estimates that, in 2003 alone, global immunization initiatives saved 2 million lives and UNICEF concludes that by 2015, immunization could be preventing 4 to 5 million child deaths each year.

Yet none of this would have been possible without the cold chain: the logistical processes and refrigeration systems that keep vaccines within strict temperature parameters from manufacture through administration. But with over 200,000 vaccine refrigerators in use in the developing world alone (according to PATH), most of them in harsh and remote environments, keeping the cold chain up and running is a major challenge.

Smart Connect

We developed the Smart Connect device to confront communication barriers and address the cold chain challenge by bringing a “digital dial tone” to remote health posts in the developing world.

Smart Connect device at Pacayita Health Post

We started in Nicaragua. During our research we visited rural health clinics in places like Yolaina, El Serrano, and La Fonseca bordering the remote Caribbean lowlands and Pueblo Nuevo, Las Cruces, and Zompopera in the Central Highlands. Each clinic serves a population of about 1,000 people with a staff of one to three.

During visits to these remote posts, we learned that it often takes many hours of travel by foot, horse or bus to reach the nearest town. As a result, health workers face long delays in picking up diagnostic test results and submitting reports. Also, problems such as running out of supplies or trouble with equipment go unreported.

It turns out that much of the necessary communication requires just a small amount of data. For example, a nurse in Nicaragua said she would like to know when the clinic lost power, so that she could check the vaccines, and she would like to know when pay was available so she could plan her visit to town. Based on these and other examples, we determined that SMS messages could be used by Smart Connect to send information.

In Nicaragua, we also discovered that – even though cell phones were widespread – health care workers would not consistently have cell phones. Cell phone coverage is often marginal – so some phones would work and others wouldn’t, or one had to find a very special place to stand to make a call. With most cell phone users relying on prepaid usage, it is common to have phones run out of credit.

We decided to make Smart Connect a facility based device. Even though it has many parts in common with a cell phone, it is constructed to be secured in place. We did this to improve security of the device, to ensure that the device was associated with the health facility, to allow it to connect with external sensors and to make it possible to connect to an external antenna for improved reception.

One of the first applications for Smart Connect is temperature monitoring of vaccine refrigerators. Refrigerators which regularly drop below freezing are quite common – so it is important to bring these to the attention of cold chain managers. Temporary power disruptions and breakdowns are also a problem since they lead to vaccines getting too hot.

Previously, refrigerator temperatures were tracked and recorded by hand with long delays in collecting the records. Now Smart Connect records the refrigerator temperature and sends out alert messages when there is a problem. Messages are sent to a web site and then automatically relayed to service technicians. A daily summary of refrigerator temperatures is also sent to the web site so that the manager can understand how well the equipment is functioning.

Beyond temperature monitoring, Smart Connect has the capacity to run a range of additional applications. For example, the Smart Connect deployment in Vietnam includes an application to track the use of vaccines so that that “stock outs” can be avoided. In the future, we plan for Smart Connect to be used with a bar code scanner to be able to read tags on vaccines when they arrive, and a printer to be able to provide receipts of test results to patients.

With Smart Connect we have seen that a small amount of communication delivered by SMS can have a big impact. By “thinking outside of the phone” we have created a custom communication device that meets the specific needs of rural health facilities and improves healthcare services in communities in Nicaragua, Vietnam and beyond.

This was first published as Thinking outside the phone by National Geographic