Ready for the WhatsApp Revolution in Health Care Communications?

March 20, 2018Twenty percent of the world ' s population is using it already. Time for us to catch up.Facebook announced in January that WhatsApp has more than 1.5 billion monthly active users —20% of the world’s population!—who send more than 60 billion messages every day.Of course, quickly messaging people via computing technology is not new. However, this communications medium could revolutionize the way we communicate with health workers and their clients.To give you a sense of WhatsApp ’s reach and potential for improving global health:In India and Brazil, 80% of small businesses are already using WhatsApp to communicate with their customers.In Zimbabwe, WhatsApp alone was responsible for half of all internet traffic in the country last year.In Central and South America and South Africa, WhatsApp has erased the digital gender gap prevalent in almost every other digital tool.6 Reasons for the WhatsApp RevolutionWhatsApp has six key differentiators that set it apart from SMS text messaging (the darling of digital development practitioners) and most other instant messaging tools.1. Rich communicationsIn our love of SMS, we have learned to count every character and celebrate when they can fit their message into a text. With WhatsApp, that constraint disappears. In its place, we can send voluminous text messages and enrich them with emoji, audio files, location data, and more.This richness means that communicating via WhatsApp requires a whole different approach —fo...
Source: IntraHealth International - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: news