Two weeks ago I wrote about MWC13 and today I would like to share with you some additional highlights from some of the mHealth events from Congress. It was Oscar Gómez, the Director of eHealth Product Marketing in Telefónica Digital, that said the quote in this blog’s title—and I think he’s right. I hope that the below lessons from key mHealth thought leaders during Mobile World Congress will help any newcomers to the mHealth space understand its challenges.

Arjen Swank, Text to Change’s Programme Manager and Business Developer, spoke as part of the session ‘Health: Innovating for Global Health’ about the challenges, tools and lessons learnt.

In fact, Text to Change’s main lessons learnt are very similar to most of the other players in the mHealth space. As Arjen identified in his presentation, when working in the mobile health space, one needs to:

• (Re-)consider their own resources
• Set realistic timelines
• Get the content right
• Incentives work!
• Involve the right mix of communication channels, with a combination of broadcasting through traditional media and narrowcasting with new media. Or, as Marcus Sigurdsson from McCann Health said in a separate presentation, ‘Success is not dependant on technology! Healthcare is a medical challenge. Health is a communications challenge.’
• Technology is a tool, not a goal in itself. Oscar Gómez also addressed this during his presentation, saying, ‘Technology is a key to improve healthcare models… but it’s not sufficient!’

Text to Change’s Main Recommendations:

• Understand where and with whom you work
• Take time to develop a comprehensive program design
• Create partnerships for the most impactful service by searching for synergies and stick to your expertise
• Plan multiple moments for M&E. Be flexible and adjust where required
• And above all, Keep it simple!

A Strong Foundation for Partnerships

Kirsten Gagnaire, the Global Partnership Director for the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), also shared key learnings in her presentation: Health: Achieve Scale through Partnerships. She discussed partnership building, with a focus on building a strong foundation for partnerships and lessons learnt.

According to Kirsten, a strong foundation for partnerships has:

• A common vision
• Common goals
• Governance
• Clear roles and responsibilities
• Shared values, and
• MOUs

As Kirsten stressed, when work with partners it is very important to:

• never underestimate time that needs to be invested into building and maintaining relationships
• understand an ROI expected from partnership of each partner
• understand partners’ culture and how to effectively interact and communicate
• understand and clearly outline financing, funding, streams and associated fees, and
• obtain written MOUs with clear commitments including how and when commitments will be executed

The importance of partnerships was echoed by Oscar Gomez, in his presentation ‘Partnering with the Customer’. According to Oscar, ‘Building partnerships is a key to deliver’ However through his eyes, the most important partner is THE CUSTOMER.

Putting it all together

Even though the mHealth industry recognises the above lessons and recommendations as important elements in creating sustainable mHealth services, I find that often these are not put into practice. Organisations that overvalue their own resources, set unrealistic timelines, or do not use a mix of communication channels are not rare. Also not rare are examples were too little effort is put into the content itself, too much in the technology and no incentives are considered.

mHealth is challenging! However, as we all know by now, the opportunity to create a sustainable mHealth service is great! This opportunity requires a lot of effort in all the elements mentioned, including: partnership creation, promotion, content, technology and incentives.