The Effectiveness of Mobile-Health Technologies to Improve Health Care Service Delivery Processes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Free, Caroline; Phillips, Gemma; Watson, Louise; Leandro, Gioacchino; Felix, Lambert; Edwards, Phil; Patel, Vikram; Haines, Andy

doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001363

Cited by 933 publications

(757 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…For example, new private philanthropic support for develop ment has expanded, 67 logistics and information and computer technology businesses have emerged, and m-health (health services using mobile technologies) initiatives have fl ourished, with benefi ts to service delivery and care management. 68 New forms of public-private partnerships have emerged in the health sector from which lessons can be learned about how to identify a balance of interests and incentives among partners. 69 As a result of these many public and privatesector intersections, the interest of the public sector towards business involvement in undernutrition eff orts has increased substantially.…”

Section: Private Sector Engagement: Maximising Potential and Managingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of reducing malnutrition: building commitment and accelerating progress

et al. 2013

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In the past 5 years, political discourse about the challenge of undernutrition has increased substantially at national and international levels and has led to stated commitments from many national governments, international organisations, and donors. The Scaling Up Nutrition movement has both driven, and been driven by, this developing momentum. Harmonisation has increased among stakeholders, with regard to their understanding of the main causes of malnutrition and to the various options for addressing it. The main challenges are to enhance and expand the quality and coverage of nutrition-specifi c interventions, and to maximise the nutrition sensitivity of more distal interventions, such as agriculture, social protection, and water and sanitation. But a crucial third level of action exists, which relates to the environments and processes that underpin and shape political and policy processes. We focus on this neglected level. We address several fundamental questions: how can enabling environments and processes be cultivated, sustained, and ultimately translated into results on the ground? How has high-level political momentum been generated? What needs to happen to turn this momentum into results? How can we ensure that high-quality, well-resourced interventions for nutrition are available to those who need them, and that agriculture, social protection, and water and sanitation systems and programmes are proactively reoriented to support nutrition goals? We use a six-cell framework to discuss the ways in which three domains (knowledge and evidence, politics and governance, and capacity and resources) are pivotal to create and sustain political momentum, and to translate momentum into results in high-burden countries.

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Section: Private Sector Engagement: Maximising Potential and Managingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of reducing malnutrition: building commitment and accelerating progress

et al. 2013

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“…It is also inherently evident that most of the studies reviewed in this paper were undertaken over shorter periods of time (between 2 years and 4 days). Whereas this is a limitation beyond this paper, it is a calling for longitudinal studies and long term programmatic efforts that would provide more detailed evidence [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Message-Based Communication Through Mobile Phones for Medication and Treatment Adherence Improve Health Outcomes? A Systematic Review

Mwangi¹,

Mukanya²

2017

J Pharma Care Health Sys

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Medical non-adherence has been a pervasive issue in healthcare for far too long and consequences of medical non-adherence are far reaching. With the proliferation of mobile technology globally, there have been concerted efforts to improve adherence using mHealth both in developed and developing countries. The objective of this study was to evaluate through previous studies whether mobile phone innovations improve health outcomes through adherence messages to patients and how many of the studies mention and actually consider the content going out to patients as contributing to positive or negative health outcome. A systematic review was conducted using four search engines: PubMed, Mendley, Advanced Google, and Google Scholar. The publications were randomized clinical trials, cross-sectional studies, and pre and post interventional studies. The publications reviewed were considered to be eligible if they were based on use of mobile technology or smart phone applications in improving health outcomes through sending adherence messages. Forty one potential articles were retrieved based on the first search criteria and review of abstracts. Full text was not obtainable for 11 articles due to fees to access the document and/or a registration requirement for the websites making the full text inaccessible. Nine articles were published before the year 2009, 7 were systematic reviews, 1 was an SMS based study but was used by community health workers and did not necessarily address adherence, 3 were protocols for a study to be done, 10 articles met all the inclusion criteria. Mobile health technology has been proven to contribute towards improving adherence to treatment, medication and appointments. However it is crucial to consider the content and its development processes just as much as the technology in use as this might elevate the health outcomes even higher.

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“…These include inconsistencies in the kinds of smartphones used by community healthcare workers that lead to poor imaging of the condition, which in turn, causes difficulties in assessing and diagnosing patients (Asgary et al, 2016;Free et al, 2013). Additionally, a systematic review of mHealth interventions on community healthcare workers found that most interventions were overwhelmingly focused on the context of the global North, with many of them having limited success outside of that space (Free et al, 2013). Missing from these studies are the cultural contexts, and more specifically, the cultural contexts of Asia.…”

Section: Mhealth and Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

mHealth, Health, and Mobility: A Culture-Centered Interrogation

Dutta

Kaur‐Gill

Tan

et al. 2017

Mobile Communication in Asia: Local Insights, Global Implications

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In this chapter, we examine the interplays of the symbolic and the material in the constructions of mHealth. By attending to the key themes that play out in discourses of mHealth, we examine critically the ways in which power plays out in the structuring of mHealth solutions. The articulation of mHealth as instrumental to generating positive health outcomes in communities across Asia erases the contexts within which mobile technologies are constituted. mHealth interventions reproduce the logics of the state and the market, reproducing communities as homogeneous and monolithic sites of top-down interventions.

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The Effectiveness of Mobile-Health Technologies to Improve Health Care Service Delivery Processes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract: Caroline Free and colleagues systematically review controlled trials of mobile technology interventions to improve health care delivery processes and show that current interventions give only modest benefits and that high-quality trials measuring clinical outcomes are needed.

Cited by 933 publications

References 54 publications

The politics of reducing malnutrition: building commitment and accelerating progress

The politics of reducing malnutrition: building commitment and accelerating progress

Does Message-Based Communication Through Mobile Phones for Medication and Treatment Adherence Improve Health Outcomes? A Systematic Review

mHealth, Health, and Mobility: A Culture-Centered Interrogation

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