What is mHealth Evidence?

Home-based care nurse Alex Ngalande works on a laptop computer at St. Gabriel's Hospital in Namitete, Malawi. © 2008 Josh Nesbit, Courtesy of Photoshare

A health worker uses a PDA at a hospital in India. © 2009 Frederick Noronha, Courtesy of Photoshare

Community health workers practice text messaging with mobile phones during FrontlineSMS training at St. Gabriel's Hospital in Namitete, Malawi © 2008 Josh Nesbit, Courtesy of Photoshare.

Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS:Medic assists a community health worker with mobile phone usage during FrontlineSMS training at St. Gabriel's Hospital in Namitete, Malawi. © 2008 Josh Nesbit, Courtesy of Photoshare

Community health workers practice text messaging during FrontlineSMS training at St. Gabriel's Hospital in Namitete, Malawi. © 2008 Josh Nesbit, Courtesy of Photoshare

USAID | DELIVER PROJECT staff in Zambia use cell phones to collect data for malaria commodities. © 2009 Arturo Sanabria/JSI, Courtesy of Photoshare

In Bangladesh, a BRAC community health worker enrolls an expecting couple in the MAMA program so that they will receive informational SMS or Voice Messages during pregnancy and for the first year of life. © 2012 Cassandra Mickish/CCP, Courtesy of Photoshare.

Standing with her community health post in the background, an Ethiopian community health worker sends an SMS text message containing data about the malaria patients she treated during the week. Community health workers are essential to malaria surveillance in the region. © 2011 Cameron Taylor, Courtesy of Photoshare.

A woman in Medinipore, India, stands in her marigold field while speaking to a customer on a mobile phone. © 2012 Courtesy of Photoshare

mHealthEvidence.org was designed to bring together the world’s literature on mHealth to make it easier for program managers, researchers, government leaders, donors, software developers, and other key decision-makers to quickly get up to speed on the current state-of-the-art and evidence-based best practices. It includes peer-reviewed and grey literature from low-, middle- and high-resource settings.

Notable Resources:

Factors that influence the implementation of e-health: a systematic review of systematic reviews. This review provides an update and re-analysis of a systematic review of the e-health implementation literature culminating in a set of accessible and usable recommendations for anyone involved or interested in the implementation of e-health.
A 2017 study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai demonstrates that conducting some studies entirely via smartphones is feasible, fruitful, and scalable: It stands up to scientific rigor, allows for large-scale participant enrollment, and captures unique environmental data not available through traditional methods.
Guidelines for reporting of health interventions using mobile phones: mobile health (mHealth) evidence reporting and assessment (mERA) checklist. This work marks the culmination of three years of multi-institutional collaborations to determine standards for reporting digital health evidence. The authors hope that the systematic use of this checklist to report research findings will help improve the quality of digital health evidence.
Mobile Technology in Support of Frontline Health Workers: A comprehensive overview of the landscape, knowledge gaps and future directions. This report summarizes current data from over 140 FHW-supported mHealth projects from developing countries to describe the emergent trends and best practices in the use of mobile phones, tablets, and technical platforms by FHWs over the last decade, understand the key considerations in choosing the type of phone and platform and associated programmatic costs, present the evidence on the effectiveness of mobile approaches, and establish a framework for systematically deploying such tools.

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mHealth Evidence is expanding to include grey literature in the growing body of evidence.

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