A System to Provide Primary Maternity Healthcare Services in Developing Countries

Abstract

Providing primary healthcare services in rural parts of developing countries, such as India, is a big challenge due to dismal doctor-population ratio. Of the 1.21 billion people in India, 68.84% live in villages while 31.16% live in towns and urban agglomerations. However, the urban physician-to population ratio is almost six times the concentration of physicians in rural areas. In addition to the dismal presence of registered medical practitioners in rural areas, the density of health workers in India is also less than the WHO norm of 2.5 per 1000 population. Hence, there is a tremendous need to increase the effectiveness of the existing health workers using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Government of India launched National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) to carry out necessary improvements in the basic healthcare delivery system in India. NRHM aims to provide effective healthcare to rural population in the country with trained female community health activists called ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist). The ASHA workers are trained to be an interface between the community and the public health system. Mobile technologies have penetrated rural parts of developing countries such as India unlike any other technology. This can be leveraged to provide primary maternity healthcare services. We have developed a decision support system named iASHA, to enable health workers to provide maternity healthcare services efficiently and transparently. iASHA can be used to register all the pregnancies in rural parts of a country and subsequently track pregnant women throughout the period of pregnancy for vaccination and periodic checkups. Appointment for ultrasonography, etc. may also be scheduled via the mobile application. iASHA system can also be used to "prevent female feticide" by identifying the ultrasonography clinic involved in illegally determining sex of the fetus. The system and method to provide effective healthcare services in rural India and also, methodology to prevent female feticide are presented in this paper.