Giving Women a Voice in their Health
This entry has been selected as a finalist in the
She Will Innovate: Technology Solutions Enriching the Lives of Girls competition.
We intend to develop and provide innovative technological tools for any institution to improve performance and optimize their skills in health, emergency and development.
About You
About You
First Name
Georgina
Last Name
Sticco
Twitter URL
Facebook URL
About Your Organization
Organization Name
InSTEDD iLan America Latina
Organization Website
Organization Country
Argentina, B, Vicente Lopez
Country where this project is creating social impact
Argentina
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
How long has your organization been operating?
More than 5 years
Has the organization received awards or honors? Please tell us about them
Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition competition, done by Changemakers
MIPP Grant Application: Mobile based solution for support of routine immunization uptake in Latin America, done by Merck
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Innovation
Name Your Entry
Giving Women a Voice in their Health
Select the stage that best applies to your solution
Growth (your pilot is up and running, and starting to expand)
How long have you been in operation?
Operating for less than a year
The Need: What problem are you trying to solve?
The decline in maternal mortality is far from the goal set by the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 (WHO Report 2012). A great number of women and babies die every year due to lack of access to proper care during and before birth. Prenatal care and care during the first days and weeks after birth could prevent at least 2/3 of infant deaths. Eighty percent of maternal deaths are preventable with the implementation of a set of proven interventions by qualified personnel. Many women, however, cannot access this care before it is too late. There are too few community health workers available to meet the demand. For many women in rural areas, they are more likely to be reached by a mobile phone signal than an outreach worker who could help connect them to lifesaving care.
The Solution: What is your solution? Be specific!
Our solution is to take clinical screening directly to pregnant women and new mothers via a mobile phone call. This system, Baby Monitor, which was developed by researchers at the Population Council, calls women at regular intervals before and after delivery. Women listen to screening questions recorded in their local language and respond by pressing keys on their phone. Baby Monitor evaluates the answers and, if necessary, sends information, makes referrals and dispatches medical help. Because the system can reference information from previous calls, Baby Monitor is able to ‘remember’ how a woman and her baby have been doing and follow-up. This can help to keep hard cases from falling through the cracks. When fully functional, the system should optimize the use of community health workers and improve health outcomes.
The Model: Walk us through a specific example of how your solution makes a difference; include your primary activities
Baby Monitor screening calls are powered by InSTEDD’s open-source Interactive Voice Response platform called Verboice. Verboice has a simple web interface that allows users to develop interactive voice response applications like Baby Monitor without requiring programming knowledge or experience. It works with virtually any type of phone line and can be used anywhere in the world.
Women only need a basic mobile phone that can receive incoming calls. No data plans or smartphones are required. In Kenya, where Baby Monitor is being piloted, as in many other countries, incoming calls are free, so women do not pay to use the service. When a woman answers a call from Baby Monitor, she hears prompts recorded in her local language. She responds to these questions by pressing keys on her phone’s keypad. The system logs her responses in a cloud database. The Baby Monitor team processes the data and takes action.
The Marketplace: Who are your peers and competitors? Identify others also working to address the needs you are and what differentiates you from them. What challenges could these players pose to your success or growth?
There are a few other groups besides the Population Council who are developing and testing similar platforms. Most of these platforms are designed to help medical personnel and outreach workers do their jobs better. Those that do communicate directly with women tend to focus on 1-way communication; they push information and reminders to patients (e.g., health information, medication and appointment reminders). Baby Monitor is one of the first platforms to deliver a screening service directly to women. The Population Council’s rigorous research agenda for this m-health tool sets them apart.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
What solution(s) does your initiative address to better the lives of girls and women by leveraging technology? (select all applicable)
Access to health care.
What has been the impact of your solution to date?
In the first year of formative research, the Population Council has been working with Jacaranda Health in Nairobi, Kenya to establish that the screening tool is reliable and valid. To do this, they are delivering screening calls to 95 women at several points before and after delivery. One day after each call, women participate in a clinical screening with a live nurse, thus providing a ‘gold-standard’ comparison.
What is your projected impact over the next 1-3 years?
The next step is to test the impact of Baby Monitor on health system and patient outcomes. The research team at the Population Council is also eager to see additional features added to Verboice that will improve and expand Baby Monitor. If successful, this proposal would support InSTEDD to develop these features that, in addition to helping to improve Baby Monitor, would be available to anyone who wants to use Verboice as an IVR solution.
Winning entries present a strong plan for how they will achieve and track growth. Identify your six-month milestone for growing your impact
We want to add support for the following:
Identify three major tasks you will have to complete to reach your six-month milestone
Task 1
Ability to translate audio messages and maintain a multi-language screening
Task 2
Ability to send SMS to women after certain steps
Task 3
Ability for the woman to trigger a call by flashing the system or sending an SMS
Now think bigger! Identify your 12-month impact milestone
These are the milestones
Identify three major tasks you will have to complete to reach your 12-month milestone
Task 1
We want to add capabilities to the system to simplify the management of follow-up action
Task 2
The system would use the call results to trigger SMS to the clinic and to the health workers
Task 3
Founding Story: We want to hear about your "Aha!" moment. Share the story of where and when the founder(s) saw this solution's potential to change the world.
The Population Council researcher who developed the idea for Baby Monitor says that the "aha!" moment came one day in his office while thinking about the challenge of delivering preventative and early intervention services to women in remote areas. He noted that there are too few outreach workers and the job is too big, and had the thought that many women are more likely to be reached by a mobile phone signal than a community health worker. This simple realization got him thinking that they could take screening and referral services directly to women. It made sense to him to create a personalized service for women that could get out ahead of frontline workers, identify women who need the most help, and coordinate care more effectively to make better use of the short supply of outreach workers. The InSTEDD “aha!” moment for Verboice came when we realized that for voice applications such as BabyMonitor to go mainstream we had to find a way of making it really simple for anybody to scale.
Sustainability
Tell us about your partnerships
We have developed this project with contributions from PopCouncil and Grameen. We have several partnerships in Latin America
Please elaborate on any needs or offers you have mentioned above and/or suggest categories of support that aren't specified within the list
Besides financial support to improve the tool in areas we have already identified, we could use a lot of help in getting a better understanding of needs in different scenarios and contexts. Support in spreading the idea and getting adoption could also be very helpful.
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 | 16 weeks ago Georgina Sticco said: Muchas Gracias por el comentario. Te contactaré para seguir charlando sobre el tema y mejorar la propuesta, Saludos! about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 16 weeks ago maria belen cesar gallardo said: Hola trabajo en el Ministerio de salud de la Nación en Argentina, soy Coordinadora General del Programa Nacional de Salud Bucodental, ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 32 weeks ago Giving Women a Voice in their Health has been chosen as a finalist in She Will Innovate: Technology Solutions Enriching the Lives of Girls. |
| 40 weeks ago Georgina Sticco updated this Competition Entry. |
| 41 weeks ago Georgina Sticco updated this Competition Entry. |
| 41 weeks ago Georgina Sticco submitted this idea. |
