Adoption and Impact of Mobile Health Services: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract

Though healthcare services via mobile phones is freely available in Bangladesh, very few rural households use it. In this paper, I study whether information and experimentation with the mobile health services (MHS) can improve adoption and how adoption impacts health behaviors. I find that information about the service improves households’ awareness by more than 30 percentage points but does not affect adoption in the following two months. However, encouraging households to make a call and experience how the MHS works increases the adoption of the MHS by 17 percentage points. The adoption of MHS decreases households’ health expenditure, mostly driven by the reduction in medicine consumption. This happens because households that adopt MHS also make fewer visits to informal providers who usually overprescribe medicine.

Keywords: Mobile health, mHealth, technology adoption, experimentation, spillover effect, access to healthcare