Key take-aways from Mobile World Congress: Call on government leadership and committed financing in digital health

This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) heavily featured the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the role the mobile industry plays in achieving the 17 point plan to end poverty, halt climate change and fight injustice and inequality by 2030. While GSMA is part of the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development which aims to showcase and document the power of information, communication and broadband-based technologies for sustainable development, our GSMA Health team is working towards reaching SDG 3: ‘Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages’.

At the MWC exhibition space this year, we saw a variety of futuristic health solutions ranging from smart home technology, wearables to robotic surgeons and intelligent implants. Additionally, this year’s congress acknowledged the importance of digital health by featuring its potential on the main stage as well as the Ministerial Programme. Natalia Pshenichnaya, Head of the mNutrition programme, participated in a fireside chat on ‘Accelerating Digital Health through the Power of Collaboration’. Speakers of the session emphasised some key lessons learned to this day as well necessary steps for widespread adoption of digital health in the developing world.

Dr Ann Aerts (Head of Novartis Foundation) shared recent achievements and lessons of the Novartis Foundation:

  • A national ICT framework facilitating alignment between health and the ICT sector can promote connectivity and interoperability, common standards, and enable appropriate policies and regulations.
  • Digital health can expand coverage and access to healthcare, reduce costs and increase efficiencies of healthcare systems by using real-time data for decision-making, empower patients and health providers and facilitate their interaction.
  • Effective governance mechanisms with clearly defined roles that engage stakeholders will lead to efficient decision making for national digital health strategy.
  • Successful national digital health strategies need sustained senior government leadership as well as committed financing.

 

Minna Aila (Vice President Corporate Affairs, Nokia) made surprisingly similar points about a need for government involvement and financing:

  • Digital health is about outcomes, empowerment, inclusion and innovation. It is crucial to move away from complex information silos.
  • Government leadership is essential for scaling digital health, especially in committing resources, facilitating digital strategies and paving the way for policy.
  • Data collection during customer engagement is absolutely essential in order to make health systems more efficient. At the same time, it is crucial to assure customers’ trust in the data collection process through data security and confidentiality processes.

 

Natalia Pshenichnaya (Head of mNutrition, GSMA) answered questions around MNO role in digital health and GSMA lessons learned from project implementations and recent research:

  • There are three main models for financial sustainability in digital health:
    1. The customer pays, e.g. Grameenphone’s Tonic in Bangladesh is a subscription-based digital wellness and health service for consumers that provides a range of digital health services and packages.
    2. The government pays, e.g. Philips and Telkom Indonesia’s Mobile Obstetrics Monitoring service where the government pays for the service at a district level with no charge for patients as healthcare is decentralised in Indonesia.
  • Healthcare provider pays for/ subsidises the digital channel, as it allows for optimisation of their core businesses – e.g. reduces costs. PSI clinics started using digital and see value in subsidising digital health services as they increase PSI performance as a health provider.
  • When it comes to the role of Mobile Network Operators, connectivity is essential. However, there are other assets that can be leveraged, such as ICT capabilities (hardware, software), payment and billing platforms, go-to market expertise and the relationship with local authorities (see graph below).

Complementary assets within public-private partnerships (Source: GSMAi)

Some 400 million people worldwide do not have access to essential healthcare services. On average, there are 0.3 physicians per 1,000 inhabitants across Sub-Saharan Africa, compared to 2.8 in the UK. Digital health applications represent a unique opportunity to enhance traditional healthcare services and programmes as there were 420 million unique mobile subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa at the end of 2016, equalling a penetration rate of 43 per cent. Therefore, we believe that investing in digital health will help meet SDG 3 faster. In order to fast-track this development, we highlighted recommendations for mobile operators, and the importance of leveraging their multiple assets within public-private partnership framework in our recent report, ‘Scaling Digital Health in Developing Markets’.

As the healthcare sector overall is a late-comer to digitisation, even in high-income countries, it will take time to fully implement and leverage the advantages of digital health in emerging markets. In the meantime, we at the GSMA will continue to work with the ecosystem and its wide range of stakeholders in order to explore possible business models in the already complex environment of public health.

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This project was funded with UK aid from the British people.

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