Joel Selanikio writes this month in America's Quarterly on the many benefits the mobile phone is bringing to the health of poor and rural populations worldwide. 

An excerpt:

Efforts to improve health care with mobile phones—a strategy referred to as mHealth—often focus on rural health workers in part because, while most such workers around the world receive some initial training, they do not have access to ongoing instruction or continuing education: no workshops, no journal subscriptions, no video training, and no conferences. Yet because many or most of those health workers now have mobile phones, there is, for the first time, the possibility of communicating regularly with health care specialists, experts, researchers, and each other in far flung places. This opens the possibility of sending relevant educational information by methods as basic as the text message.