I’d like to introduce you to the Service Maturity Tool (SMT), the newest addition to the GSMA mHealth research tools.

Over the past year the GSMA has been working on the development of the SMT in collaboration with a varied group of mHealth industry experts representing multiple stakeholder groups within mHealth. I’ve been eating, sleeping, and most importantly dreaming SMT, and to be very honest, I’m genuinely excited and proud of what we’ve managed to achieve so far.

In short, the SMT enables the objective evaluation of the maturity of mHealth products and services across macro and micro-economic indicators, for sustainable and scaled integration of mHealth products and services into a health system.

The SMT value proposition:

• A framework that can be used to evaluate the current state maturity of mHealth products and services: valuable for self-assessment
• Provides services with a ‘road map’ for growth: catalyst the growth of mHealth products and services
• Guides practitioners towards the identification and adoption of best practice to achieve scale and sustainability: facilitates shared learning and sharing of best practice with industry
• More effective partnership development

Positive Feedback:

We’ve tested the SMT on a variety of mHealth services in South Africa, Malawi, India and Pakistan. We’ve had very positive feedback from the services we engaged with, regarding the value they attribute to the SMT:

‘I really enjoyed going through the SMT evaluation process. It enabled us to see our work from a broader perspective and understand where we should invest our time in improving our services/products to progress towards maturity and sustainability. We have already commenced work towards filling the gaps and strengthening areas related to standardising our global implementation tools.’

-Mohini Bhavsar, Dimagi

We’ve been working with the WHO and John Hopkins University on the development and testing of the SMT:

‘I cannot reiterate how impressed I am with the SMT. It captures elegantly so much of our thinking across NGO and program monitoring scale discussions.’

-Dr Alain Labrique, John Hopkins University

Upcoming Workshop:

We’ll be hosting a workshop on the SMT at the mHealth Summit in Washington DC in December. If you’re interested in participating, or you simply want to find out more about the SMT, you may contact me on [email protected]