Connecting to a Healthy Future
In a cutting-edge $10 million public-private partnership, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Emergency Plan/PEPFAR), the GSM Association Development Fund, Accenture Development Partners, Motorola, MTN and Voxiva will leverage technology to connect health systems in 10 PEPFAR-supported countries by 2010. This partnership will help address the need for a health care infrastructure to adequately address the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Phones-for-Health will make timely, relevant information available to program managers and service providers, while also helping PEPFAR achieve its ambitious goals — to support treatment for 2 million HIV-infected people, support prevention of 7 million new infections, and support care for 10 million people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS in an accountable and sustainable way.
By working in close collaboration with Ministries of Health and global health organizations, this partnership will develop an integrated set of standard information solutions that support the scale-up of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other infectious disease programs in a cost-effective manner that builds local capacity.
The Benefits of Mobile Phone Technology
- Worldwide, cellular technologies have demonstrated the incredible power of communication as an agent for social change. The Phones-for-Health alliance will utilize that power by extending the ability of Ministries of Health to create national health information networks that reach all communities.
- By bringing together the existing mobile phone infrastructure in the developing world, countries can extend the span of health information networks to reach the vast majority of their populations, even in remote areas.
- With Phones-for-Health, health workers in the field can use software on their mobile phones to submit critical health information directly into central computer systems, allowing health officials and service providers to view, analyze and respond to this vital data immediately.
|