Brief description of the project:
Can information delivered over a mobile phone improve someone’s health? Can it improve the quality of care received in a rural clinic? The Mobile Technology for Community Health (MOTECH) initiative in Ghana is a partnership between Ghana Health Service, Grameen Foundation and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the project aims to determine how to use mobile phones to increase the quantity and quality of prenatal and neonatal care in rural Ghana, with a goal of improving health outcomes for mothers and their newborns. The MOTECH system was launched in July 2010 in the Upper East Region; a replication in Awutu Senya district in Central Region will happen in April 2011. Further opportunities for scale across Ghana will be assessed in the second half of 2011. If successful, it is intended that MOTECH will be launched nationally in Ghana, and that this will become a showcase for replications throughout Africa and the world. The software system used in Ghana is available via OpenSource license and can be used for implementing a wide range of mobile health applications.