Wednesday, January 11, 2012

ARTICLE - REDUCING INFANT MORTALITY

REDUCING INFANT MORTALITY WITH PHONES
(Forbes) - By Mobiledia

Pesinet, an agency that combines mobile health and insurance, is using cell phones to reduce child mortality in Mali, as more phone-based initiatives bring healthcare into impoverished areas.

Mali has one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates, with more than 110 deaths for every 1,000 live births in the country, and nearly 200 out of every 1,000 children dying before age 5. These high figures prompted creation of the non-profit Pesinet, which uses mobile technology to provide regular health checkups and affordable health insurance for young children in Bamako, Mali’s capital.

Pesinet covers about 600 children. Families pay a small monthly fee to enroll children in the program, which covers medical examinations and half the cost of medications needed to treat a sick child.

The agency focuses on preventive care. Community health workers test children weekly for symptoms of illness, including fever, cough, diarrhea, weight loss or vomiting. They then enter data from the weekly checkups into a custom-designed app on their mobile phones.

The data is sent via GPRS to an online database, where doctors review it for signs of sudden, troublesome changes in health status. If changes are found, community health workers get an alert on their phones and communicate with the child’s family to arrange for the child to receive proper treatment.

Pesinet joins other mobile health programs endeavoring to improve health conditions and manage disease in the developing world. A program called MOVE-IT uses cell phones to register births and deaths in Kenya, providing critical information used to improve public health initiatives like disease prevention, vaccination programs and prenatal care.

Other mobile health programs strive to halt the spread of contagious diseases, such as a Cambodian initiative that reports malaria cases in rural areas via text message, securing earlier treatment to improve cure rates and keep the disease better contained.

In Haiti, health workers track cholera cases on specially programmed Nokia phones, shortening the time between infection and reporting of the disease to secure prompt treatment.

Pesinet has been well received in Mali so far, although the program’s leaders had to educate Mali’s citizens about the program’s benefits, since both health insurance and preventive care are nearly unheard of there.

The agency also is struggling to create a sustainable economic model, since so far the premiums paid by families are not enough to fully finance Pesinet. The organization also faces network connectivity issues limiting its usefulness in rural areas that don’t have reliable Internet connections.

The organization is working on finding better technology solutions and funding, and plans to roll the program out to more areas in Mali to continue saving lives.

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