My twitter feed fills daily with announcements of new electronic or mobile technology projects aimed at improving health in the developing world.

Given all this excitement around global e-health and the corresponding funding increases for new projects, it is timely that “Health Affairs” dedicated its latest issue to the topic. The journal articles address many current issues in global e-health that need more discussion, which will hopefully, lead to greater collaboration and scalability of projects.

In one of the first articles, Gerber and co-authors describe an agenda for action in Global E-health. They state seven recommendations that emerged from a 2008 conference sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation: (1) document the impact on access to, affordability of, and quality of health services; (2) remember the ultimate goal of e-health should be to strengthen health systems and improve people’s health; (3) support collaboration and innovation across resource-constrained countries and learning between developing countries; (4) reduce donor fragmentation and harmonizing donor requirements and reporting; (5) develop the information and communications technology “business case” to increase donors’ and stakeholders’ involvement; (6) strengthen stakeholder collaboration; and (7) provide funding for pilot projects and adequate evaluation.

Those are ambitious recommendations. Given all the excitement about e-health, new projects and initiatives are emerging every day. Many are small pilot projects with just enough funding to get started and very little to evaluate their impact.

At kiwanga.net, Ken Banks, founder of FrontlineSMS, implores the e-health community to think about capturing metrics that answer the tough questions about how a product impacts someone’s health and life. Tracking the number of text messages or data exchanges is fairly simple. Tracking if patients return for follow-up care and improve their after receiving test results by SMS is much harder. But worth the effort, Banks says.

“We shouldn’t get too obsessed with the data,” he writes. “But it’s important that we don’t forget it altogether, either. We need to recognise the scale of the challenge.”

Also of note: a systematic review of evaluations of e-health implementations in developing countries by GHDonline Health IT moderators Joaquin A. Blaya, Hamish S.F. Fraser, and Brian Holt.