The integration of mHealth technology into the delivery of global public health programs has grown rapidly since the early 2000s. Projects ranging from SMS tutorials on family planning, to immunization records capture, to Ebola triage applications have been successfully implemented around the world. The most innovative and creative technologies have risen to the top of public health programming. The competition for the best and newest often makes professionals in the field forget about the solutions that already exist. A desire for continued integration and scale up help us realize that the road to success requires collaboration. It’s easy to forget that the small lessons we learned on the sports field and in the classroom as adolescents have their place in professional settings.

At last year’s mHealth Summit in Washington D.C. on December 7-11th, I attended a panel titled: Scale Up Starts with Design. The audience of the panel hoped to learn solid advice on how to expand their own innovative programs. Instead, they quickly realized that the real lesson to learn was one they have known their entire lives: scale up starts with collaboration.

One of the panelists was Qualcomm Wireless Reaches’ Blake Tye. Qualcomm is a partner of Vecna Cares in Nigeria, capturing critical maternal and child health data at 51 health centers. Blake noted Qualcomm’s experience working in both Nigeria and the Philippines. Both programs have been successfully scaled up as a result of collaboration. Pooling resources and knowledge over five years has allowed the Wireless Access for Health program in the Philippines to work in over 68 clinics in 14 provinces, seeing approximately 2,500 patients a day.

When one thinks about international development in countries like the Philippines and Nigeria, one thinks of NGOs working in a silo on small pockets of restricted funding. Imagine if all of those organizations were working together? Pooling resources and ideas has the potential to unleash sustainable and meaningful change. The simple lesson I learned from the mHealth Summit was to look for organizations already working in the field and to collaborate as if every organization was your teammate.

 

 

 

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