Last week, Samsung announced that it was donating 3 000 phones to medical workers in ebola hit areas. A phone, however, is only as much use as the information on it – and a lesser noticed part of that announcement was that the handsets would arrive in the pockets of doctors and nurses with an app called Smart Health Pro pre-installed.
So what is Smart Health Pro, and why is it important? We maabout:blanknaged to catch up with one of the creators while they were in Cape Town.
Smart Health Pro first appeared in June, as part of a GSM Association (GSMA) led push to improve access to health information via mobile handsets. Under the organisation’s mHealth programme, the app was part of a suite of services launched in a number of African countries including South Africa, mainly targeting women and children on the continent.
mHealth is not the only such co-ordinated mission to put information into people’s hands as simply as possible. Notably, internet.org – the Facebook led consortium for promoting access – has a similarly multifunction suite. Unlike many commercial health apps in the market, however, Smart Health Pro is an ecosystem that provides a range of professional applications, information and services from external sources.
To its credit, GSMA has used its weight to bring its members on board with helping to propogate its mHealth apps. MTN customers can access the app for free; Samsung has discounted 80 million discounted phones and tablets for health workers; Gemalto is loading up its SIM cards with data and automated installations.
Smart Health Pro can be configured for health workers and consumers but the currently available Smart Health Pro app is only for professionals in the public sector. The consumer version will launch in early 2015.
Health workers each have access to content in the areas they have knowledge and skills in.
“We’re working the Department of Health in the North West and Limpopo provinces to support ward-based outreach teams, starting with health workers who are using some of our existing software to coordinate something of the other things the software doesn’t cater for.”
“Smart Health allows us to harness all of the tens of thousands of mobile apps, services and content out there and to provide it in a very simplified, coordinated, coherent fashion,” says Andi Friedman, head developer of the app. “Before you had all these initiatives proliferating, but very little to bring them together to make any sense to a health worker who is bewildered by all of the content.”
“What makes Smart Health different is we’re not trying to replicate what’s already out there, but this allows a single, unified interface for health workers and consumer so they don’t have figure out what app is needed for what, the interface reaches out and links what is needed for them. It also allows already existing apps to talk to each other without having to change their architecture,” says Friedman.
One of the other reasons why Smart Health Pro provides an ecosystem is so that other apps can address some of the obstacles the GSMA is currently facing in providing services. So if health workers have a diagnostics app, for example, they’re able to scan test results and pull them into another app by another vendor, pushing your own functionality into the ecosystem.
To cater for the many languages spoken on the African continent, Smart Health Pro can be offered in any language and can also pick up what language your phone is set to and render it in that language.
An example of some of the content featured on Smart Health Pro is the Ebola Outbreak portal, which was recently added as health workers in the affected West African countries continue to fight the disease. Health workers can report cases, read up on FAQs, see a map showing where there’s an outbreak, receive lab results they have sent, check which of their equipment and stock are available and get information from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Health workers can also easily conduct CD4 count tests on HIV patients with a simplistic finger monitor that connects to a phone via USB port without having to go to a clinic or wait for weeks for lab results.
The app is only available for Android at this point because GSMA wanted to target the lower-end smartphone market first. “Android also offers the unique capability for apps to talk to each other, while some platforms may not. We’re looking at deploying this on $40 and $50 handsets to make sure as many people as possible can have access to the app,” Friedman adds.
