Dear HIFA colleagues,
See also: https://www.hifa.org/news/mhealth-innovate-exploring-healthcare-workers-...
Since 2022 HIFA is supporting mHEALTH-INNOVATE, a 4-year international research project exploring how health workers use their personal mobile phones to support their work. HIFA adds value to the project as the main platform for sharing multidisciplinary experience and expertise on this topic. Prinicipal Investigator Claire Glenton noted: "HIFA has been a vital part of the mHealth-Innovate research project as it has given us a unique opportunity to discuss topics with healthcare workers, managers and policy makers from across the world." Your inputs over the coming days and weeks on HIFA are crucial and will feed into high-level policy discussions at WHO.
In this FIRST phase of the HIFA forum discussions, from now until 21 April, we shall discuss the findings.
We start by reviewing one of the first activities in the research programme. In 2022 we held a thematic discussion on the HIFA forums. This was subsequently analysed and published in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Digital Health:
CITATION: Claire Glenton et al. 2023. Using an online community of practice to explore the informal use of mobile phones by health workers. Oxford Open Digital Health, Volume 1, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/oodh/oqac003
ABSTRACT: Health workers are increasingly harnessing mobile phones to develop their own solutions to work challenges. The mHEALTH-INNOVATE project aims to explore this topic further. In 2022, Healthcare Information for All organized an online discussion among health workers and other stakeholders to inform the project. Twenty-five people joined the discussion. Contributors’ descriptions of the varieties of mobile phone use tallied with previous research, including for communication with patients and colleagues. In addition, they described increased mobile phone use in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased need for communication, monitoring and reporting, including during lockdowns. Some solutions were health worker-initiated, including the establishment of WhatsApp groups. The discussion has helped develop a definition of informal mobile phone use.
'We have used the results of the HIFA discussion, in combination with published research on the topic and input from experts within our research team and its international advisory group, to develop a working definition of health workers’ informal mobile phone use. We define informal mobile phone use as healthcare workers’ use of mobile phones to support their work, using approaches that are initiated by the healthcare workers themselves and that are initially not standardized, regulated or endorsed by the health system or organization to which they belong.'
I invite comments on the above. The co-authors are Claire Glenton, Josephine Nabukenya, Smisha Agarwal, Michele Meltzer, Elisabeth Mukendi, Immaculate Nakityo Lwanga, Josephine Namitala, Sunanda Reddy, Geoff Royston, Tigest Tamrat, and myself, and we are all on HIFA forum. We look forward to hear from them and from you. How did you become involved in this research project? What role have you played and what has been your experience so far?
HIFA mHealth-Innovate is our first example of a HIFA Research-based Project and has proved an innovative approach to bring a wider perspective to health systems research. We now have two HIFA Research-based Projects, with a further two confirmed to start later this year. For more information on HIFA Projects see www.hifa.org/projects
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org