In today's International Herald Tribune, Thomas Crampton looks at the way cell phones could help improve health care in third world countries using technology from Voxiva.

Dr. Innocent Nyaruhirira, minister for HIV/AIDS in Rwanda, says the current system requires that clinics write all key information down on individual pieces of paper, which are then hand-delivered to Kigali by porters. "We are a country of one thousand hills, so it often takes one month to receive a message from the field about a disease outbreak or drug shortage," he says.

"The travel time cripples drug-supply management, prevents live tracking of disease outbreaks, undermines monitoring of health programs and delays delivery of laboratory test results back to patients," Crampton writes.

But Voxiva's system allows health workers to send reports by cell phone from the field. "First deployed five years ago to track disease outbreaks in the Amazon Basin, Voxiva's system is also being used in Indonesia for avian flu reporting and in India to test a new drug for leishmaniasis, a disease spread by sand flies," Crampton writes.

The system was deployed in Rwanda two years ago, and now connects 75 percent of the country's clinics. Thanks to a collaboration between the WHO, the GSM Association, the U.S. government and Voxiva, the plan is to bring the same system to 10 African nations by 2010.