Research Projects

• Millennium Villages
• Access Project
• CNHDE
• HIV/AIDS
• Tuberculosis
• Neglected Tropical Diseases
• Human Nutrition
• Community Health Workers
• Early Childhood Development
• mHealth
• eHealth
• Monitoring and Evaluation
• Support to the Health Extension Program of the Ethiopian Ministry of Health
• Nigeria OSSAP/LGA Conditional Grant Scheme
• Climate Risk Management and Public Health
• Haiti Project
• Tropical Lab Initiative
• Eliminating Mother to Child Transmission of HIV
• Oral Hygiene
• International Advisory Panel on the National Rural Health Mission of India
• Model Districts Project in India
• Ministerial Working Group

mHealth

The term mobile health or mHealth, describes the use of mobile telecommunication and multimedia technologies as they are integrated within increasingly mobile and wireless health care delivery systems (Istepanian and Lacal 2003). It can be defined as “mobile computing, medical sensor, and communications technologies for health care” (Istepanian 2004). With the increasing uptake of mobile phones throughout the world, definitions are being broadened to include the maximized use of mobile phones and other mobile technologies to enhance access to health services and information and their use as tools to improve the delivery of health-related services for the general public and among health professionals. mHealth can be used to describe informal and formal health-related uses of voice and text functions of basic mobile phone handsets or more sophisticated algorithms-based decision-support and data collection tools accessible through SmartPhones.

To maximize the benefits of existing trends, CGHED has created mHealth@MVP, a program that seeks to use mobile telephones and technologies within the Millennium Villages Project. mHealth@MVP seeks to accelerate the achievement of the health-related Millennium Development Goals – namely goals 4, 5, and 6 -- which aim to reduce maternal/child mortality and morbidity, and control the spread of preventable disease like HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and TB among others. To this end the mHealth Program at the Center for Global Health and Economic Development leverages mobile technologies to:

• Improve access to emergency and general health services.
• Improve efficiency of health service delivery.
• Enhance collection on vital statistics on births and deaths to refine public health interventions.
• Improve clinical practice for enhanced health outcomes.
• Reduce child and maternal mortality and morbidity in Millennium Villages.
• Improve disease surveillance and control.
• Improve monitoring and evaluation of health system activities for enhanced planning and decision-making.

CGHED works in collaboration with Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, MTN, Zain, mHealth Alliance, Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development, Open Mobile Consortium, and World Health Organization and others to reach these objectives.