SDG3: Good Health and Well-being
Why it matters
SDG 3 focuses on ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all. However, the Covid-19 pandemic and other crises are impeding progress in achieving SDG 3. These challenges amplify existing health disparities and jeopardise efforts aimed at establishing universal health coverage. Additionally, the pandemic has highlighted the urgent need for robust global health security systems to effectively prevent and respond to future pandemics.
The industry’s contribution
Mobile health solutions are playing a growing role in achieving SDG 3. An additional 1.4 billion people have used mobile to improve or monitor their health since 2015, taking the total to 2 billion (36% of mobile subscribers). Examples of health solutions include the following:
Healthcare providers have built a range of mobile apps and websites to facilitate the distribution of knowledge, awareness and education of healthcare-related information. These platforms provide insights into topics such as diseases, maternal or reproductive health and medical procedures.
Digital solutions can be used to connect healthcare providers and patients, enabling them to communicate directly through text, online chat platforms, phone calls or video chats. Telehealth services can help make affordable and quality healthcare more readily available, particularly in LMICs.
Health diagnostics and monitoring at home enable the wider reach of healthcare delivery, as services can be delivered and managed remotely. Many solutions combine IoT devices, such as wearables and clinical-grade devices, with telehealth services. This can help governments improve health outcomes, particularly in rural areas where people travel long distances to speak to medical professionals.
Mobile solutions can also improve health-system financing. For example, mobile money solutions enable affordable insurance offerings to low-income households. Examples from Kenya show that 35% of low-income households using hospital facilities took advantage of M-Pesa transfers to pay their bills.
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Maximising mobile’s impact by 2030
Maximising mobile’s impact on SDG 3 requires extending the reach of digital health services to those on the lowest incomes and driving adoption to serve those with low literacy levels and the least purchasing power. This requires governments to draft laws and regulations that tackle sector-wide information and data governance issues, and to address specific sub-sectors of digital health, such as telehealth and online prescriptions.
Case Studies
