One of the encouraging aspects was the number of young people who attended the conference. PHASA provides young researchers and public health professionals with a platform to present their findings, conclusions and ideas.

Something less positive that stood out for me however me was the lack of technical attendees at the conference. This surprised me due to the fundamental, enabling role that I believe ICT can play in improving public health. Although the use of technology, and mobiles in particular is beginning to gain momentum, there need to be far more forums where health and IT professionals can meet to discuss the challenges and opportunities which exist in the sector.

I was fortunate to be seated with one of the members of the PHASA executive during the Gala dinner. We briefly brainstormed a few potential remedies and one possibility which surfaced was the creation of an mHealth Special Interest Group within the PHASA framework. Although not an ideal solution by any means, I think such an entity could be a starting point in opening the channels of communication between domain and technology experts.

Hopefully the potential direction this could take will become clearer in time and I’ll certainly share any developments as they unfold.

For us, it’s a strong indication that the use of mobile and web technologies is becoming more widely accepted in the public health community as a viable and valuable tool in tackling primary health care issues.

The presentations at the conference where Mobile Researcher was involved include:

• Experiences of using cell phones in data collection in a large scale project (V. Magasana, P. Ijumba, Z. Msimela, S. Ndwandwe, N. Radebe, M. Msweli, S. Mavuso)
• Using a web based information system to manage the implementation of a randomised controlled trial (P. Ijumba, Y. Singh, M. Tomlinson)

Several other organisations present findings on studies where Mobile Researcher was also leveraged as a data collection tool.

As we work with a number of organisations with a strong focus on public health, we’ll be there to highlight how mobile and web technologies are being used to solve real public health challenges, particularly for initiatives involving community-based health workers and randomised control trials. Using mobile phones as the catalyst, practical health information systems can be established which can be used for logistics management, fieldworker monitoring, participant and patient tracking, monitoring and evaluation, and pure data collection.

We’ll also be demonstrating the latest feature enhancements to our mobile application which are due to go live in a few weeks. A few of the organisations who are using Mobile Researcher in their projects will also be presenting papers at the conference.

We hope to see you at the conference – please feel free to drop by our exhibition stand to engage, challenge and brainstorm with us. We’ll have a few handsets there for anyone interested to try out the mobile application for themselves.