Mobile Phones and SMS for Addressing Development Needs
Via iConnect Online Welcome SMS technology for TB treatment there is another story which reinforces some experiences I have had in education in Africa. This time it is a health behavior approach. This is terrific. A doc in Cape Town was having problems because his mother kept forgetting to take her TB medicine. He started sending her SMS messages to remind her. "It did not take him (Dr. Green) long to make the connection between the effectiveness that his SMS messages had on alerting his mother, the high incidence of TB in Cape Town, and the possibilities that bulk SMS messages could present. However, when he wanted to pilot his innovative idea with TB patients at a local clinic in Cape Town, he met with resistance. Healthcare professionals were skeptical about the number of patients who would have access to cell phones. Not deterred, Dr. Green went back, did research and persuaded them with statistics which indicated that over 50% of Cape Town residents have cell phones. In addition, he found that 71% of patients at the clinic he earmarked for the pilot had access to cell phones. The local health authority eventually agreed and paid R11.80 per patient per month to run the SMS reminder service. The results of the pilot have been outstanding: of the 138 patients involved in the pilot, there was only one treatment failure."
I find it interesting that he met resistance. It seems like a no brainer, but ya never know!
posted by Nancy White at 3:19 PM
2 Comments:
Nancy, nice post, and very encouraging. I'm not surprised that there was resistance. I'm becoming more, not less, wary of new technologies. So easy to buy; not always easy to use; or even remember to turn on.
I agree that this is an easy solution for the problem of helping people take their meds on schedule. It works in S. Africa and other countries where SMS messaging is a common practice. It wouldn't work so well in the U.S. because SMS is still an add-on (sometimes costly) to cell plans. I meet plenty of folks with cell phones who don't use SMS.
If you go to this site you can get online at any time and send SMS messages all around the world http://www.bargainbulksms.co.uk
They have a free sign up to test it out and i use it all the time and save a fortune on my SMS bill.
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