The GSMA mHealth team is delighted to share with you a new resource entitled Maternal mHealth: Solution / Product and Technology Framework, created with the support of various local organisations.

This mHealth framework provides principles, models, concepts and guidelines for delivering interoperable mobile solutions for maternal health. It broadens and extends previous work developed by the GSMA and others and was developed based on information and research carried out towards implementing mobile and maternal health programs and projects in African countries including a maternal health information exchange and a maternal messaging program.

This framework is limited to a single solution, to the challenge of providing a national interoperable solution and technology infrastructure for mHealth messaging.

The framework has been developed with the following objectives:

• Guide further discussion around maternal mHealth services among stakeholders, including Ministries of Health, funders and private sector partners
• Provide a basic approach to the development of interoperable mobile maternal services at a system level
• Provide recommendations to guide developers and implementers of mHealth applications in low resource settings
• Guide future expansion of present systems to other functions and areas of health service provision.

The framework outlines an approach to developing an interoperable solution for maternal mHealth, based on defined maternal health services and mHealth applications and solutions that are readily available and may already have been implemented in-country. The purpose of this approach is to assist low resource countries to leverage existing investments in working solutions while simultaneously strengthening the public health system.

The framework focuses on a fairly limited set of maternal use-cases but the principles and architecture are applicable to a wider domain, both within maternal health as well as other services in healthcare and in other domains. This provides a starting point that can be extended to include more comprehensive workflows, in the future, such as capturing antepartum summaries.

Furthermore this document also provides a quick overview of recommendations for low resource environments:

• Policy Decision. Strong drivers, well-articulated rationale, alignment with Ministry of Health objectives and executive buy-in and commitment are required preconditions without which any project will almost certainly fail.
• Governance, Regulation and Legal Environment. The regulatory environment should also be conducive to the development of the project. This includes the required legislation empowering data collection and allowing unique identifiers to be collected. The interoperability framework provides guidance around the adoption of standards.
• Develop an Interoperability Framework and Standards Catalogue for mHealth and eHealth. An Interoperability Framework is a very important document to create a context for interoperability between both mobile and eHealth applications.
• Formulate a Maturity Model. Although several different maturity models have been published, there may be local adaptations that are important to consider in making the model locally relevant and useful for the purposes of adaptation and compliancy testing, should this be implemented at some point.
• Develop an Open Architecture for Health.
• Develop enterprise and/or domain-level architectures. The interoperability framework provides a starting point for interoperability but needs to be extended further to be practically useful. One way to do this is to create an enterprise or domain-level architecture from the Interoperability Framework.
• Harmonizing Data and Processes.Having adopted bases standards and profiles, it is possible to harmonize the processes and data collected using different applications into a single workflow or continuum of care.
• Balance Between Immediate Utility and Future Proofing.It is important to understand that implementations are something of a moving target. Users mature in their interaction with systems and their expectations grow. Success breeds success, resulting in successful systems being scaled and expanded to deliver new services. It is important to adopt standards and profiles that satisfy immediate requirements and that are reasonably scalable and interchangeable.
• Adopt a systems approach with evaluation. A systems approach and modeling techniques such as systems dynamic modeling can help tease out the effects of different workflow interventions and the impact of interventions on one another. Careful data collection and gathering will allow the contribution of the different workflows to be quantified and their respective contribution to improved system performance estimated more accurately.

Last but definitely not least, the document also addresses the potential benefits of the framework:

• Providing Continuity of Care
• Maximizing Existing Investment and Resources
• More Robust and Sustainable Systems
• Maximizing Data Use

Please take a look at this and more in the full Maternal mHealth: Solution / Product and Technology Framework that you will be able to find here.

Feedback is, as always, very welcome.

For more information on GSMA Mobile for Development mHealth, please see here or contact us on [email protected]. For information on global mHealth initiatives, click here.