• HeatherLaGarde: Didn’t expect Hans Rosling to make me cry but he just did #ghc36 #ghcp2
• hexmode: To say there is a developing world & western world is like saying there are only clever ppl and stupid ppl — Hans Rosling #GHC36
• tylepard: Hans Rosling is amazing. We must stop talking about the dichotomy of Western vs. developing countries. #GHC36 http://www.gapminder.org/
• ResearchAmerica: Javier Guzman @ #ghc36 on G-finder, tool that quantifies R&D investment for neglected dis. drugs. Could answer crucial funding questions.
• jamesbt: Don Berwick via @openmrs: Information is care. #ghc36
• suzrainey: All throughout conference is common theme: shortage of healthcare workers. #ghc36
• suzrainey: PATH: baby weaning from HIV mother sometimes only has black tea to drink. This is why we are here. But how can we expedite solutions? #ghc36
• jamesbt: Opportunity: Performance support tools built on @smsmedic, @openmrs. Truly empower frontline healthcare workers @ point of care. #ghc36
• ashifi: Amazing stories from award recipients at the GHC banquet. Good results can take time… Congrats to the London School & others. #GHC36
• jamesbt: Thought: you can develop a service to meet an existing demand, but you can also develop a service first then generate demand for it. #ghc36
• LAlexanderson: Back in Boston after a long, yet thought provoking week in the district at #ghc36. Really yearning to go to the field now.

And the last two are bonus ones that sum up a great week:
UnknownLife: #GHC36 I wish the VT staff was closer. Great people They put on 1 heck of a conference too.
WGHA: Lisa Cohen tweets from GHC: The passion and dedication and optimism of the attendees is inspiring #GHC36

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.