Morning Briefing

"The use of cell phones by community health workers and other medical practitioners in low-income countries has been promoted as a potential revolution for health systems development," Sanjay Basu, a resident physician in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, writes in this GlobalHealthHub.org post, then asks, "But is mHealth really going to improve health outcomes? Or is it just another technological bomb thrown at poverty and poor infrastructure?" Basu writes that though mHealth "sounds good in theory, the results in practice have been surprisingly mixed," and he discusses several reasons why "it's unlikely that we'll see mHealth generate mass mortality benefits in the near future" (3/16).