Text4baby is a mobile health (or mHealth) education programme sending free text-messages to women who are pregnant or have a young infant, that was launched in February 2010. The programme is a public–private partnership supported by a number of industry and public sector partners that include government agencies, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, corporations, academic institutions, professional associations and non-profit organizations. By covering all of USA and now spreading into other countries, such as Russia, it is the largest scale up of an mHealth intervention globally. In an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Michelle Van Velthoven and colleagues concluded that As the first national programme of its kind, text4baby should be rigorously evaluated to ensure that pregnant women and their babies benefit from the programme, and that the programme truly becomes a role model for public–private partnerships in mHealth.
As part of a session on primary care data in the Health Informatics module on the Imperial Master of Public Health Programme, I asked students to work in two groups to present arguments for and against the NHS Care.Data programme. Care.Data is an NHS programme that will extract data from the medical records held by general practitioners (GPs) in England. The Care.Data programme takes advantage of the very high level of use of electronic medical records by GPs in England. After extraction, data will be uploaded to the NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC). The data will then be used for functions such as health care planning, monitoring disease patterns and research. The programme has been controversial with proponents arguing that the programme will bring many benefits for the NHS and the population of England; and opponents arguing it is a major breach of privacy. You can view the two presentations to help inform you further about these arguments: Arguments fo...
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