Review of the Prospects and Challenges of mHealth Implementation in Developing Countries
Background: The drastic increase in the applications of mobile voice and data has provided optimism to use mobile telephony for mobile health (mHealth) to bridge healthcare gaps in rural and unserved areas. Global statistics show that mHealth interventions are being scaled up in developed economies but remain less implemented in Africa especially, the Sub-Saharan Africa including Ghana. Even though mobile phone adoption in Africa is high and keeps growing at a faster rate than elsewhere, the continent has not fully engaged the potential of the mobile phone to solve nagging health issues.
Objective: Our study seeks to identify the prospects and challenges in the implementation of mHealth in developing countries and suggest ways to resolve them.
Methods: To achieve the objective, we conducted a qualitative and systematic review. Sites such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, Health-related and Scopus were surfed for articles containing empirical data on mHealth development and implementation. Selection criteria for articles was based first on mHealth implementation, secondly on the prospects and lastly on the challenges or drawbacks to its deployment in least advanced economies. A wellstructured mechanism was applied to extract data and qualitative methods used to analyze them.
Results: Searches retrieved 300 citations and taken through rigorous screening to determine the inclusion list. At least 150 records were eliminated as junk URLs and duplicates, leaving 150 articles. Further scrutiny in terms of their titles and abstracts left 100 articles meeting the review criteria. mHealth was observed as a major technological tool used by researchers and innovators to effectively close the health gap. Apart from the benefits of implementing mHealth, almost all the papers discussed the challenges involved.
Conclusion: The review demonstrates that mHealth is used by most countries as a tool to improve healthcare access by eliminating the geographic barriers from the healthcare equation. However, technological challenges, illiteracy, sociocultural difficulties, lack of qualified health workers among others, oppose to the success of mHealth. Resolving these challenges would lead to scaled ups, increase accessibility, service quality and cost cuts.