The bulk of the Alliance was formed a year earlier from some of the top companies in technology at a conference hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation.  Companies such as Nokia, Microsoft, Cisco, Google and others came together with their host to join the already established partnership between the UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation in forming an alliance, “to create a platform to bring the technology and health sectors together to maximize the impact that mobile technology can have in improving health across the developing world” as stated by UN Foundation Vice President for Global Health, Danial Carucci. They believe that in forming an alliance they can help further the UN’s efforts towards achieving the  health related goals set forth in the UN Millennium Development Goals

The UN Millennium Development Goals or MGD for short was created at the turn of this century (2001 to be more exact) to address such health concerns as infant mortality rate, prenatal health and combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases in emerging societies. This has become one of the major cornerstones of the mHealth Alliance and a primary focus of the mHealth movement. While some efforts  have done better than others aiding in the reduction of these problems, they are still in fact problems and the emergence of The mHealth Alliance has helped reinvigorate efforts in combating these concerns.

Leading foundations to Form mHeatlh Alliance

mHealth was born out of  healthcare efforts in emerging countries such as Africa and India where there are either too many people per doctor or the distance between doctors and patients is too vast. Before mHealth villages and towns were on their own and forced to travel great distances for checkups and treatments, but as cellular technology matured in places like Europe and the United States the costs of deployment were significantly reduced allowing the adoption in poorer regions of the world. In places like Africa, villages that had never seen a telephone before were being introduced directly to cellular phones “leapfrogging” them into the 21st century. mHealth initiatives were created to use the available technology to fill the gaps in distance and resources to help improve the greatly underdeveloped healthcare systems of the countries of the continent.

Unfortunately due to how new the idea is behind mHealth, we are just now seeing the results of the efforts of the projects used to create the concept of mHealth. One of the major problems that has arisen in mHealth is the fragmentation of projects taking place, the idea of mHealth has become huge for companies looking to score on early research and development of solutions, but the problem is there are too many projects being worked on in different places. A partnership was created in 2004 between Vodaphone and the UN to look into the effects of mHealth on emerging countries and in 2009  the joint venture released a report which covered 51 different projects being conducted around Africa. While they found the projects succeeding in their goals, they also realized with strategic partnerships and more of a concentrated effort between projects there could be greater success and from that study the mHealth Alliance was born.

This is Africa: A Global Perspective – Healthcare at the Touch of a Button