We are still recovering from the 36th annual Global Health Council meeting held in Washington, DC last week – in total there were 2500 participants from over 100 countries, all here to talk about technology for humanity in the context of global health. As expected there was heavy representation from the big players, but there were also some small global health start-ups (full list of participants in this PDF).  As has been the premise of our site for the last several years this type of theme at a major public health conference was long overdue. The agenda was flush with a variety of innovations and technologies: diagnostic tests, vaccines, anti-shock garments for pregnancy, mHealth, vouchers for health services, even turntables for global health. Across the board, two things I heard often about various technologies were that context (supremely important) and measured impact (we need outcomes and evidence) matter.

Social media – Twitter, conference blogs, and Flickr – played a more important role in this year’s conference, although it’s clear increased participation will be required for it to provide meaningful value to conference participants. The conference was essentially about new technology and impact on community, and Twitter certainly fell into this category – it was the most successful technology used to form micro-communities for those at the conference and for those who could not attend. Jaspal used Twitter effectively for micro-blogging and through that we both met people we probably would have not otherwise. The use of Twitter (search.twitter.com “#GHC36″) for this meeting was a great example of crowdsourcing, idea exchange and getting strangers to chat with one another (invaluable).

Here are a few paraphrased thoughts and quotes that capture some of the flavor of the conference (if anyone has a list of best quotes or best things they saw at the conference let us know in the comments or by e-mail):

Technology & Systems
These innovations are not magic bullets – larger supporting systems need to be in place for them to be effective, and there are opportunities for improving outcomes by improving the usability of products.

Technology & People
One of the key challenges Mitul Shah highlighted during his talk was better understanding the relation between people and technology..we need more “basic market research” and “impact evaluations”… and an understanding of how cultural perceptions of technology impact social desirability bias seems to be a critical gap…context matters. It’s not just a matter of phone vs no-phone – culture, age, gender all matter, too.

Mobile Phones, Sustainability, Outcomes & Scale
Paul Meyer – mHealth strategies have been around since 2001.  And sustainability?  They’re already sustainable – over 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions exist worldwide, we should all think a little bit harder about our models of improving health outcomes and design them so they can be scalable.

Ashifi Gogo – 20% of deaths associated with malaria could be prevented with mHealth strategies…In rural Ghana, when individuals are sick, the first point-of-contact for health care and/or treatment are often chemical sellers, which can be fake or licensed…One solution – mPedigree has developed an SMS system to verify whether or not a drug they purchased is legitimate (”Yes”) or fake (”No”).

Project Masiluleke (mah-sah-loo-lick-ay) has sent 1 to 1.5 million “Please Call Me”s a day through SMS. Misinformation and competing narratives of HIV/AIDS have all played a role in fueling the stigma that has made HIV and AIDS so difficult to prevent, treat, and mitigate.   Through the power of “Please Call Me” tactics, Project M has increased the average call volume to the National AIDS hotline by threefold.

Hans Rosling:
“War does not explain the high rates [of HIV in Africa]“…“We have to start to use data in global health”…“People should be forbidden from talking about ‘HIV in Africa’”

Global Health Progress has a full list of our posts over this period.