mHEALTH-PHC - Application design for rural health care

Reducing Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) is one of the important Millennium Development Goal (MDG) [1] and many countries are working on it. In India, it is being addressed through National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). Though Government is taking huge efforts, considering the vast geographic area and less Doctors: Patient ratio, there is a gap in health-care delivery. To address this challenge, mHEALTH-PHC - mobile based remote health-care delivery platform was developed and piloted. This platform enabled health workers to digitize the patient's data and ask questions to doctors. Doctors could see the questions along with the data and give appropriate answers. This experiment was conducted for more than a year for a set of approximately 300 expecting mothers in one of the most under-developed and remote regions of the state. Since this was one of the early initiatives in rural health-care delivery, it was a very good learning experience. There were excellent interactions and feedback from the ground level health workers. An innovative "Participative Design" approach was used for this purpose. This paper captures the experience of designing a health care application for rural India, the tools and methodologies used, issues faced and how these were resolved. The paper also discusses the strategies used for optimizing the fairly large set of information to suit small form factor of mobile screens without losing data fidelity, categorization and prioritization. The design was then translated to mobile based application. Analysis of usage by the health workers, their experience and impact on overall health delivery process was also studied.