“Mobile phones are also being used in health care. Oneway text alerts, sent to everyone in a particular area, can be used to raise awareness of HIV; sending daily text messages to patients can help them remember to take their drugs for tuberculosis or HIV. Mobile phones can be used to gather health information in the field faster and more accurately than paper records and help with the management of drug
stocks. Cameraphones are used to send pictures to remote specialists for diagnosis. Bright Simons, a Ghanaian social entrepreneur, has devised a phonebased system called mPedigree to tackle the problem
of counterfeit drugs. Some 10-25% of all drugs sold are fakes, according to the World Health Organisation, and in some countries the proportion can be as high as 80%. Under Mr Simons’ scheme, which is
being implemented in Nigeria and Ghana, a scratchoff panel on the packaging reveals a code which can be texted to a special number to verify that the drugs are genuine. Most mobilehealth projects are still at the trial stage, but a report compiled in 2008 by the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation documented around 50 such projects across the developing world. Studies are now under way to quantify their benefits. These new services have become feasible because mobile phones are increasingly ubiquitous. We are now in a new phase where we are seeing the network eff
ects of so many people using mobile phones, says Mr Simons. His system can, for example, safely assume that the pharmacist in any given village will have a mobile phone. These textbased services, though they fall short of full internet access, have the potential to unlock a range of social and economic benefits to users of even the most basic mobile phones. There’s a lot of talk about what you can do with more sophisticated devices, but it’s much more compelling when you focus on the devices that people have in their hands today, says Mr Edelstein.”
Click here to download the Economist Special report on telecoms in emerging markets
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