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SOUTH AFRICA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Joins iheed to Host World’s First Mobile Health Education Conference
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Submitted by IQ4News on Thu, 09/06/2011 - 8:31pm
iheed Institute, the Irish global health initiative, and global education leader, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, brought together over 200 international delegates, representing mobile phone manufacturers, network operators, NGOs, software companies and Governments, to the world’s first mobile health education conference, mHealthEd, which took place in Cape Town, South Africa, this week.
The conference was designed and organized by iheed Institute and sponsored by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Delegates gathered at the conference to share experiences, discuss innovative new technologies and map out the future potential of the emerging mobile health education sector.
Mobile Health Education leverages the proliferation and relative cost effectiveness of mobile phone devices to improve the training and skills of front-line health workers and provides them with simple diagnosis and data collection tools.
Mobile phone usage in emerging economies has grown exponentially in the past decade with seven out of every ten people owning a mobile phone in India and China and almost one in every two people in Africa. According to the International Telecommunication Union, 90% of the world’s population now have access to mobile coverage. As the quality of mobile phones and mobile networks improve it is clear that mobile technology can develop solutions that support larger-scale and faster training of health workers, and improve patient understanding of disease prevention.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has partnered with iheed on this mobile health education initiative to serve as a catalyst for extending digital and mobile education to K-12 institutions and ministries of education around the world.
Speaking at the conference, Fiona O’Carroll, Executive Vice President, New Ventures and Innovation for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said, “Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is pleased to be working at the forefront of mobile learning technology. Our alliance with iheed and their work in the mobile health arena is a catalyst for advancing mobile education in all aspects around the globe. Digital and mobile media are changing the way we learn and consume information. Our new mobile learning initiative will support learning on demand, anytime/anywhere, all while meeting the needs for 21st century learning.”
A report by Dalberg Development Partners and iheed Institute which was presented at the conference outlined the future potential of mHealth education. The report stated that to reach the 2015 Millennium Development Goals for health, developing countries need to train over 3 million health workers in the coming years. Shortages of budget, schools and trainers would make that almost impossible, but now that the majority of health workers have mobile phones, that is changing. The report points out that mLearning is already a half a billion dollar a year industry in the USA. Bringing that know-how to health-worker training could help countries meet their targets, improve workers skill-levels, improve the health outcomes of millions of the World’s poorest people and reduce the cost of training by tens of millions of dollars. The report also called for integration of mobile health education into developing countries health resource strategies, and the creation of a shared library of suitable mobile learning content.
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