A Doctor in Your Pocket: Health Hotlines in Developing Countries

Abstract

Afiya lives in the rural Sylhet region of Bangladesh. For two days, her youngest daughter, Rubina, has been complaining of fatigue and has felt warm to the touch. Taking the child to the nearest clinic would cost Afiya a day's lost wages, round-trip bus fare, and clinic fees of Taka 200 (U.S. $3). Instead, Afiya and her husband use the family's mobile phone to dial "7-8-9," the Healthline hotline service set up by TRCL, Ltd., a telemedicine firm, and GrameenPhone, the country's largest mobile network operator. The family quickly reaches Dr. Quadri at Healthline's call center in Dhaka. After asking a few questions, Dr. Quadri tells her to give Rubina small regular doses of paracetamol, available at neighborhood shops. For the threeminute call, Afiya pays only Taka 15 (U.S. $0.21) from her family's GrameenPhone prepaid talk-time balance.Afiya is not the only person seeking basic medical advice and information by calling a health hotline. Telephone-based nurse triage, primary care, and health information have been offered in developed countries since the late 1990's, and

Development and validation of an instrument to measure user perceived service quality of mHealth

“…A recent study shows that at present there are 51 large-scale mHealth programs being operated in 26 developing countries around the world [2]. Although these programs are experiencing higher adoption because of their widespread access and cost-effective solutions, they require immediate assessment to measure the service quality and its effect on service outcomes [1,2,15,[18][19][20][21][22]. Despite the profound importance of service quality, there is a paucity of research which has developed and applied metrics to analyze this relationship [1].…”

“…Composite service quality in pervasive health care Sneha & Varshney [6] 2009 Ubiquitous patient monitoring Ivatury et al [111] 2009 Mobile telemedicine in developing countries Han et al [31] 2010 Mobile ubiquitous health service scenario design Akter et al [1] 2010 Service quality of mHealth Kahn et al [101] 2010 Applications, opportunities and challenges Curioso & Mechael [112] 2010 Collaboration between health care and IT Feder [113] 2010 mHealth solutions in developing countries Akter & Ray [15] 2010 Applications and challenges of mHealth WHO [114] 2011 mHealth: challenges, opportunities and applications…”

“…In recent years, this particular business-to-consumer (B2C) mHealth platform has become very popular in the developing world (e.g., India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mexico, South Africa, Peru, etc.) and is serving millions by delivering right-time medical information services [1,15,20]. Currently, more than 44 million people in Bangladesh have access to such mHealth services provided by the two major mobile operators (i.e., Grameen Phone's Healthline service and Banglalink's Healthlink service) [1,15,20].…”

“…and is serving millions by delivering right-time medical information services [1,15,20]. Currently, more than 44 million people in Bangladesh have access to such mHealth services provided by the two major mobile operators (i.e., Grameen Phone's Healthline service and Banglalink's Healthlink service) [1,15,20]. Under this platform, a patient can access this service at any time by dialing some unique digits (e.g., '789' in Bangladesh) from his/her mobile phone and receive health services in the form of medical information, consultation, treatment, diagnosis, referral, and counseling from registered physicians.…”

Improving care-seeking for facility-based health services in a rural, resource-limited setting: Effects and potential of an mHealth project

“…Strategies such as SMS to deliver health-related messages (Crawford et al 2013) and hotline systems to enable two-way communication between individuals and health workers, have helped overcome some of the challenges surrounding utilization of health facility-based services (Ivatury, Moore and Bloch 2009;Corker 2010). More specifically for Malawi, mHealth solutions have been limited largely to strengthening providerto-provider communications and data reporting.…”