Reviewing mHealth in developing countries: A stakeholder perspective

Infrastructural deficiencies, limited access to medicare, and shortage of health care workers are just a few of the barriers to health care in developing countries. As a consequence, the burden of disease and its impact on the livelihoods and the economic productivity of people are staggering. mHealth has been extolled as one possible solution to overcoming these challenges, yet discussion of mHealth systems is often limited to specific tasks and user groups. To address this, we adopt a stakeholder perspective and analyze existing research on the mHealth process in developing countries. Specifically, we focus on three key stakeholder groups, i.e. healthcare workers, patients, and system developers. We perform an in-depth analysis of 60 peer-reviewed studies to determine the extent to which different mHealth stakeholder interactions are researched, and to identify high-level themes emerging within these interactions. This analysis illustrates two key gaps in existing mHealth research. First, while interactions involving healthcare workers and/or patients have received significant attention, relatively little research has looked at the role of patient-to-patient interactions. Second, the interactions between system developers and the other stakeholder groups are strikingly under-represented. We conclude by calling for more mHealth research that explicitly addresses these stakeholder interactions.