mHealth applications show great promise in improving health services and outcomes. However, there is a lack of evidence about the actual wide-scale health impacts of mHealth projects. The limited scale and scope of evaluation in mHealth projects is partly due to the newness of the technology but also to the desire to have results quickly. A robust evidence base about the effectiveness of mobile health technology is important, not only for cost-effectiveness and scale-up purposes, but also to share information about what works and what doesn’t work.

The "Evidence" section of the mHealth Toolkit includes links to abstracts of journal articles that share results of robust randomized trials of a number of mHealth projects.