2017 ICT4D Conference

Health workers use Medic Mobile to register every pregnancy in their communities, automatically schedule reminders about care visits, report danger signs to clinical teams, and coordinate with clinics to ensure delivery in facilities with skilled birth attendants.

They register pregnancies using the Last Menstrual Period (LMP) for a schedule based on the expected date of delivery, and flag danger signs and high-risk pregnancies in a dashboard for nurses.

We are working towards national scale in Nepal to deliver this core antenatal and postnatal care toolkit to multiple districts. In rural Nepal, female community health volunteers (FCHVs) are responsible for visiting expecting and new mothers in their community and counsel them on antenatal care (ANC), postnatal care, and report their progress at the nearest health post. FCHVs use Medic’s SMS-based system to provide counseling and follow up with the women during pregnancy regarding ANC visits and safe delivery.

By the end of 2016, we worked directly with multiple partners to equip and support the FCHVs through District Health Offices in Baglung, Dhading, Illam, and Gorkha districts. The increased interest and ownership of these systems by district leadership is promising. To date, we have equipped more than 2000 FCHVs in Nepal to use our tools. As an example, last month, the Baglung project confirmed 242 deliveries, 76% of which occurred at a health facility. We also received 71% of the delivery confirmations we expected (based on when women were registered as pregnant).

In addition to the technical deployment, training, and support, our team has engaged in longer-term sustainability planning. This presentation session will share an in-depth look into our national scale work in Nepal, our partnership with the Nepali government, and share implementation experiences and learnings from this work.