Vishal Sharma
Tanushka Malhotra
Arushi Bansal
Sakshi Ajmera
Pruthvi Sainath
YESHITESH SHIRODKAR
Goa Institute of Management
Divya Singhal
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There are a range of adverse health effects associated with maternal under-nutrition (malnutrition and micronutrient deficiency), anaemia and lack of facilities which can lead to the death of the pregnant women. To curb it, four youngsters for Nashik have developed the ‘Maatritva’ app. The vision of Maatritva is not only to reduce the number of preventable deaths but to enhance the experience of motherhood and enable safe delivery. This goes in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-being) that aims at ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being.
Maatritva helps in screening, identification and tracking of high-risk pregnant women. It makes sure that the woman and child are provided with appropriate care.
The mobile platform has the functionality to scan a QR code. Each pregnant woman has a unique code which maps all the information about her health and phase of pregnancy. It predicts the risk factor of the pregnant woman as per the data fed by the healthcare practitioner in the system. This information consists of 25 different parameters like blood sugar levels, hemoglobin levels etc. It also becomes easy to monitor the count of pregnant women in the block.
The Maatritva mobile application has the following features:
The application has the functionality to support three different languages, i.e. Hindi, English and Marathi. It is also flexible to scale to other languages as per the requirements.
Childbearing, needless to say, is a major milestone in the life of any woman. While safe delivery is the end goal, getting there can prove to be challenge. A challenge that can get more demanding with late detection or the absence of detection of risk involved in a pregnancy.To ensure the safety of the mother and kid, focusing on the quality of perinatal care is not enough. It is essential to form a network of skilled health workers to come together and tackle the issue
When Pritesh Agrawal (25), Abhishek Verma (26) and Garima Dosar (26) met at ‘innovate for billions’ - a seven-day boot camp organised by Tata Consultancy Services in January 2016 - their objective was to find a solution to real-life problems that could impact billions. Pritesh says, “We collaborated and brainstormed on the subject of ‘ensuring 100 percent institutional delivery’ and presented a prototype which can be developed and deployed for use by the people.”
On interaction with many health workers and pregnant women after the camp, the scale and gravity of the issue and a need to address it moved and inspired the trio to further collaborate and find potential solutions to address maternal deaths.
"The motivation behind starting this organisation was driven by 3 factors mainly
● Zeal to create something and contribute towards society
● Our Previous experience in the same domain of maternal and child health.
● Opportunity and support from Digital Impact square."
- Mr. Abhishek Verma, Co-founder, Maatritva
With the team of three working tirelessly, they were able to scale the application from 2 PHCs to 135 PHCs covering the whole of Nashik district including the Nashik Municipal Corporation. Using Maatritva has not only benefited pregnant women through high risk identification but has other indirect effects such as the increase in tech literacy of ANMs in terms of using smartphones and they now feel empowered.
Maatritva presently has over 1,000 active users, over 500 midwife users, and has screened more than 13,000 pregnant women. In addition to the existing platform, in the future, the trio intends to build various other features in the platform – a referral module, information escalation module, and birth preparedness module.
From high-risk pregnancy identification to mapping referrals to concerned facilities, Maatritva has opened ways for birth preparedness by getting the efforts of all players involved in delivering the maternal health services in sync. Besides, the application has not only emphasised the need to identify high-risk pregnancies but has also given significance to identifying and monitoring the ‘at risk’ pregnant women. Thus, saving time and averting possible complications.
This app is for the women who will undergo delivery in the Nashik government or municipal hospitals. The app is useful for tracking pregnant women. Currently, this app is being used at 105 primary health centres and 30 municipal hospitals in the district.
Through this app, information about how a pregnant women should take care of herself, what should she eat and what not, reminders about the doctor’s appointment, and medicines is provided.
As a result of Maatritva’s tracking mechanism, the number of women receiving antenatal care has also gone up. The solution also helps medical officers customize interventions based on the different reasons behind risk prevalence in different areas.
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Maatritva helps in screening, identification and tracking of high risk pregnant women by increasing compliance in the health ecosystem and ensuring the continuum of care towards birth preparedness.