The Growth of mHealth in Low Resource Settings

The ever increasing global interest integrating mobile health is evidenced by a shift in the paradigm from one of curiosity to establishing an evidence base for its use. Not surprisingly, over the last past three months there have been several major publications in journals with a broad medical readership that have commented on the evidence for mHealth interventions. Most notably, Free and colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published two excellent meta-analyses in PLoS Medicine quantifying the effectiveness of mHealth interventions. The studies concluded that presently there are few studies of high methodological quality in the field of mHealth. The limited strength of evidence was in support of using Short Message Service (SMS) reminder to improve patient attendance, facilitating communication amongst health professionals, and improving patient adherence to medication (in the context of anti-retroviral treatment in HIV).(1, 2) The authors highlighted major methodological limitations and lack of scientific rigour in study design and analysis the lack of objective clinical outcomes, and the heterogeneity between reported outcomes amongst studies with similar interventions. Importantly, few studies were