mHealth in Africa

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The rapid evolution of mobile devices and the mobile internet has created new opportunities for tackling ongoing challenges in health and healthcare coverage in so-called developing countries. Despite the wealth of novel ideas on improving the healthcare situation in different African countries using mobile health solutions, there is still a lack of empirical knowledge concerning the feasibility of these approaches, especially where region-specific challenges are concerned.
The Berlin Hacking Health Chapter is happy to introduce two initiatives that aim to approach third world healthcare issues both on an academic and a practical level. Victor and Daniel, two researchers from the Technical University of Berlin, and Samuel from Ärzte für Madagaskar e.V. (Doctors for Madagascar) will share their experiences implementing mHealth solutions in a number of countries in Africa. They also welcome input on how to address the challenges the Doctors for Madagascar are currently facing in their project.

Timeline:

7:00 pm - Welcome and intro

7:30 pm - Daniel Opoku & Victor Stephani (Department for Health Care Management, TU Berlin) on their research on the usage of mHealth in so-called developing countries

8:00 pm - Samuel about "mTomady - Healthcare financing in Madagascar"

8:30 pm - Open Discussion on challenges, potentials and barriers of digital healthcare in Africa

9:00 pm - Drinks and Networking

Speakers:

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Victor Stephani is a researcher at the Department of Health Care Management at the Berlin University of Technology. Prior he studied Economics and Engineering with an emphasis on health-economics, healthcare and medical engineering at the Berlin University of Technology and the University of Oslo. His focus at the department is the digitization of health care. He is engaged in international research projects, teaching and the supervision of theses. Beside of that he writes his PhD about the utilization of mobile phones for the improvement of health care delivery in low and middle income countries with a focus on the rising burden of non-communicable diseases. As part of the PhD he recently conducted interviews with patients at a Diabetes centre in Ghana. At the Technical University he established the module „eHealth basic“ in 2016, which deals with the digitization of health care in general, with a focus on the German context. He is also involved in the set-up of a ‚Master of Public Health’ programme at the KNUST-University in Kumasi, Ghana and responsible for teaching eHealth at the KNUST.

https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/9/f/d/600_465422557.jpeg Daniel Opoku is a research fellow and a doctoral candidate at the Department of Health Care Management, Berlin University of Technology. He has been involved in several international collaborations, including working with the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin on the study on Sexual Health among Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa (MiSSA-Studie), the Berlin Working Group at the Charité Medical University on the EU-funded Research on Obesity and Diabetes among African Migrants (RODAM), and on the NUFFIC-funded project Capacity building in Community Health for the Prevention and Response to Disability in Ghana. He holds a MSc in Public Health from the Charité Medical University in Berlin and a BA in Sociology and Social Work from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He is currently working on his PhD research topic: mHealth for improved management of non-communicable diseases, and in the project “Capacity building in Health Systems Research and Management in Ghana”.

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Samuel Knauss and Julius Emmrich are clinician scientist in the Department of Neurology and Experimental Neurology at the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In 2011 Julius founded the Non-governmental Organziation (NGO) Doctors for Madagascar registered in Germany, the UK, and Luxembourg and both have been actively working together with local health care facilities to improve patient care in a resource poor setting since. Since 2015 Doctors for Madagascar has been running a project to reduce maternal and newborn mortality in the rural south of the country. To this end, the project provides staff training and development, facility maintenance, equipment and drugs to collaborating healthcare providers. In a current project they employ a digital health approach to overcome major hurdles for safe and affordable care in developing countries. The objective of the project is to establish a mobile health wallet to render healthcare related payments safer and more transparent. The project will be established within the existing NGO framework aiming to improve access to life-saving medical and surgical care

Check out our page: www.facebook.com/hackinghealthberlin/

More information on Ärzte für Madagaskar:

http://www.aerzte-fuer-madagaskar.de

Thanks for the support of ThoughtWorks Berlin!