Brown Bag Lunch: Mobile Connectivity to Revolutionize Access to Health

The Social Protection and Health Division of the Inter-American Development Bank

Invites you to the Brown Bag Lunch

Mobile Connectivity to Revolutionize Access to Health

Presented by: Florence Gaudry-Perkins International Director for Global Government Sector Alcatel-Lucent

and

Lesley-Ann Long Global Director mPowering Frontline Health Workers

The presenters will share on the ground experiences from multistakeholder initiatives and projects they have been involved in, including an ambitious mHealth project in Mexico.

Friday, November 13th, 2015

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Mobile Connectivity to Revolutionize Access to Health  Mobile innovations in health are growing at an exponential rate. For example, a new attachment for your smartphone can perform an on-screen visual test of your eyes, and Google has also developed a smart contact lens that can monitor blood-sugar levels on a continuous basis to help its wearer better manage diabetes. A dongle attached to a smartphone can, within 15, minutes detect infectious diseases, such as HIV, from a tiny drop of blood from your finger. Digital Health has been on the rise so much as of late that the venture community predicts there could be more investments in this field than in biotech in 2015.

Mobile health promises to lower costs but also provide better access to healthcare services, especially in geographic areas where health infrastructure and doctors are scarce. Better access to remote consultations, diagnosis, and basic information creates a more health-aware population. For example, just in Mexico, mHealth could, by 2017, enable an additional 15.5 million people access to the healthcare system and reduce healthcare spend by $3.8 Billion (PwC 2013). The same study estimated that public healthcare spending could be reduced by 6.9 bn USD in Brazil and per capita healthcare spend could be cut by 20% for each patient benefitting from mHealth by 2017.

In lower-income countries, many initiatives using simple tools such as SMS messages have shown great impact. The field is however characterized by too many pilots and fragmented initiatives. It is time for governments, development banks and international organizations to get more involved to create more cohesion. There also needs to be more cross-sector work between the health sector and the ICT and telecom sector to solve interoperability, security and scaling challenges.

The presenters will share on the ground experiences from multi-stakeholder initiatives and projects they have been involved in, including an ambitious mHealth project in Mexico.

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Florence Gaudry-Perkins International Director for Global Government Sector Alcatel-Lucent Florence Gaudry-Perkins is currently International Director for Global Government Sector at the headquarters of Alcatel-Lucent. Her current position entails relations with governments, multilateral and bilateral funds, as well as international organizations, an ideal platform to address the economic and social enabling effects of mobile technology and broadband in the developing world.

She is a passionate advocate of Digital Health and has helped develop a large scale multi-stakeholder mHealth program to address diabetes in Africa, which has started in Senegal, and is now working to cross-fertilize the project in other countries. An ambitious national project is now in full development in Mexico based on using mobile technology to address diabetes, obesity and overweight.

Her past work in higher education and familiarity with global health has influenced her in supporting mHealth and mLearning for health in particular. She believes that global corporations now hold a responsibility in bringing their core technologies, products, services and competencies to form alliances with NGOs, Social Entrepreneurs, Foundations, Governments and international organizations to help develop sustainable business models which can then be easier to scale and replicate across regions and market.

Contact information: Florence.gaudry-perkins@alcatel-lucent.com

Lesley-Ann Long Global Director mPowering Frontline Health Workers mPowering Frontline Health Workers (Washington, DC) is a public-private partnership focused on ending preventable child and maternal deaths. Lesley-Anne provides strategic and technical leadership to mPowering and coordinates across mHealth and maternal and child health advisors, program implementers, government officials, private technology companies, NGOs, academic institutions, and others focusing on subSaharan Africa and South Asia.

A former family law barrister, and Dean of a Faculty of Health & Social Care, Lesley-Anne has a strong track record of academic publications in law, global health, social justice, and child rights.