2017 ICT4D Conference

In Myanmar, midwives are the first line of skilled care for pregnant women/mothers, newborns, and children in the community. Improvement in reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) outcomes relies upon the ability of midwives to correctly counsel, provide service, follow-up, and refer urgent cases to higher levels of care. Significant challenges exist for midwives in terms of managing clients across various (often vertical) programs.

In this setting, where community health workers (i.e., frontline workers, FLWs) are families’ first contact with the health system, mHealth solutions have been shown to be a promising means to improving provider-client interactions. In Myanmar, in order to assist the Ministry of Health and Sports, JSI is working with Dimagi, with the support of UNICEF, to build a mobile tool to assist midwives in managing clients, following treatment protocols, reminding patients of appointments, and reporting on their activities.

This presentation will discuss the lessons learned from the collaborative process of designing a mobile application for national scale, as JSI, Dimagi and the MOHS have worked together to build a tool for all 11,000 midwives in Myanmar. The presentation will first provide an overview of the design process, then discuss the iterative process of incorporating user feedback, and then go on to outline preliminary data on from the first year of testing.