Mother and child health service delivery has been a challenge
for public health providers in rural areas due to high dropout
rates, high left out rates, quality of services, inability to track
beneficiary pregnant women and children leading to high maternal
mortality (MMR) and infant mortality (IMR) rate. With a vision to
improve maternal and child health services delivery in rural as
well as urban areas, the Government of Gujarat executed e-Mamta, a
mother and child web-based tracking application in Gujarat.
Conceptualized by the State Rural Health Mission of the Health
and Family Welfare Department of Gujarat, the funding support for
the initiative was sought under National Rural Health Mission
(NRHM) and the program was developed through National Informatics
Centre (NIC) Gujarat. To execute the initiative, a Family Health
Survey was conducted in rural and urban areas by health workers,
wherein individual records of around 92 lakh families comprising 45
million beneficiaries, covering almost 80 percent of population of
Gujarat were entered in the information system. The data was then
validated by comparing with below poverty line list, voters list
and ration card list. Secondly, a unique family healthcare ID was
provided to capture migration details. After that, all pregnant
women and children up to the age of six were registered and
provided a unique mother and child ID.
With the help of the e-Mamta initiative, 12.54 lakh pregnant
women, 4.09 lakh infants and 3.62 lakh children in the age group of
one to six have been tracked for essential Reproductive and Child
Health (RCH) Services. This has increased considerably from
1,65,635 pregnant women and 74,204 infant tracked before the
introduction of this initiative.
Under the initiative, SMS alerts are sent to beneficiaries,
health workers, and district and block level authorities to monitor
due services. Customized and bilingual SMSes are sent to target
beneficiaries or their relatives in each group before their due
dates. More than 17,433 automatic SMSes have been sent to
beneficiaries to inform them about antenatal care and 13,842
messages have been sent to inform about immunization for children
under the initiative. Also, 3,634 automatic messages have been sent
to officers to report maternal death and 14,156 to report infant
death. Apart from this, 2,04,324 manual messages have been sent for
inter-departmental corporation and to mothers and families for the
uptake of services. In addition, 16,000 SMSes have been delivered
to all nurses and doctors of Gujarat within minutes of infant
deaths reported due to measles vaccine.
e-Mamta stores individual-based service information, which can
be viewed at the state and district level. It enables instant
retrieval of historical data and service records and allows the
development of reports, such as height-weight charts and growth and
immunization charts, which can be quickly accessed and analyzed by
medical, block and district officers. Post the introduction of the
initiative, 24 graphs are available, location and period wise, that
can be viewed in various permutations for quick analysis.
The system has also helped in cutting down the time used in the
compilation of reports from sub center to block, to district to
state. Earlier, the total time required for a complete report to
reach the state center from the sub center used to take a minimum
of 25-30 days. Today, the report can be compiled instantly.
State Rural Health Mission, Government of Gujarat is an EDGE
winner. The complete list of EDGE winners is published in the
October 2011 Print issue of InformationWeek India