GSMA rolling out mHealth services across Africa
GSMA is set to rollout mHealth services targeted at women and children across aftica.
The rollout is set to kick off in Ghana.
This was revealed by the director of health at the GSMA, Dr Craig Friderichs while speaking at a media roundtable. The launch of the m-Health services in Ghana will coincide with the United Nations General Assembly.
Through its ‘Mobile for Development mHealth’ programme the GMSA has launched a new cross-ecosystem partnership with a number of private companies.
The GSMA has partnered with MTN, Gemalto, Samsung, Omega Diagnostics, Mobenzi and Mobilium to connect mobile and health industries to roll out effective mHealth services across sub-Saharan Africa, said Friderichs.
Further more the GSMA has also tracked more than 1,100 registered mHealth services but very few demonstrate any scale sustainability or significant impact on the health system, Friderichs stated. Through its cross-ecosystem partnership programme the GSMA sees an addressable market of 15.5 million women and children across the seven countries in total.
Phase one of the GSMA initiative is going to be rolled out before the end of the year in another six priority countries namely Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia.
Phase two is expected to commence in 2015, and will incorporate additional partners and services, addressing other countries including Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania.
“We believe that mobile and, information and communications technologies (ICT) as a sector has a fundamental role to play in addressing health services,” Friderichs said.
Samsung plans to offer better pricing for devices, and secondly pre-embed a ‘smart health app’ on all smartphones across sub-Saharan Africa. The app will be available for download from the Google play store.
Source: itWeb
