2017 ICT4D Conference

Approach: Community health services are critical to achieving SDG 3, and effective support supervision plays a crucial role in successful community health services. Recognizing this, the National Health Mission in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India deployed ASHA Facilitators (AF) as supervisors to Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) in 2014. To strengthen supervisors’ support of ASHAs, boost accountability, and improve use of data, the Government of UP and CRS have jointly employed custom-built mobile based applications for AFs. This unique ICT tool has reduced paperwork, increased substantive supervisory visits, improved the quality and speed of reporting, promoted transparency, and enabled data to be used for decision-making.

Results: The application captures real time data and generates monthly reports for government managers, promoting quick access to data for evidence-based decisions, discussions on priority supervision areas, and understanding of capacity building needs for AFs and ASHAs. Live dashboards provide accessible information to government officials at multiple levels. New features include monitoring of essential drug stocks, reporting infant and maternal deaths. Using the application for performance-based payment of AFs is in development.

As of Sep. 2016, program results include:
- 40% increase in the proportion of AFs who guide their ASHAs in uncompleted tasks.
- 46% increase in the proportion of AFs who discuss with ASHAs coverage of marginalized communities.
- 56% decrease in the proportion of ASHAs reporting families’ resistant to support.

Scale-up: Recognizing the intervention’s effectiveness and the potential to achieve wide impacts with modest investment, the state governments of UP and Meghalaya are planning to scale up this application in 2017 to 618 AFs who supervise 11,085 ASHAs. Six other states have also expressed interest in adopting the intervention.

The presentation will share the main features of the application and how it improves health worker performance, management decisions, and accountability.