Introduction

UNICEF Innovation Fund is proud to see portfolio member, mPower — graduate. They’ve come a long way – from numerous product iterations, to deep diving into understanding their ecosystem better, strengthening their business model, and gearing up on taking their solution to market. They’re now at a stage to collaborate at a larger scale – as they find new pathways to work with partners, investors, and the open source community.

Reflection from the team

Over the previous 12 months, we’ve established a strong footprint in the government healthcare sector with over 27 field health workers actively using an application developed to capture registration and vaccination information.

One of our goals this year was to ensure we understand the ecosystem and our users. Through our field research, we confirmed that vaccination beneficiaries and frontline health workers (FHW), as well as their supervisors — faced several challenges, namely; poor adherence to services, heavy paperwork and manual registers, no performance monitoring and tracking tool, forgetting timely vaccinations, difficult access to historic data of patients and vaccination records, and more.  

Based on these challenges we mapped out, our solution was to develop an integrated digital system that would provide: automated SMS service reminders, access to historical data anytime, anywhere, automated schedule generation and tabled based registration and information update on vaccinations.

This enables mothers to receive automated and scheduled SMS reminders about their upcoming vaccination appointments. Once mothers receive their reminders — they are able to head to the vaccination center of choice as the application allows access to historic data from any vaccination clinic connected to the application. Once the vaccination is completed, information is updated onto the application and a new vaccination (if any) is automatically scheduled into the system.

What The Solution Looks Like

We’ve developed an Android-based solution for tablets used by Frontline Health Workers. 

We also conducted initial training sessions for 15 health workers while concurrently developing multiple iterations of our vaccination application and running code coverage  — ensuring the application ran smoothly.

These two-day long training sessions were conducted in the Kaliganj Upazilla in Gazipur and included basic device training, application usage training, pre and post-training exams. As a result, a training manual was also developed to train incoming health workers. This made it easier to deploy the application and build strong initial users.

So far, using the OpenSRP app, we have had —

• 23 FHW users

• 3 FHW supervisors

• 2,700 children registered

• 2,698 Women registered

• 22,637 Vaccines registered

Way Forward

Our goal this year is to be able to replicate our solution in Bangladesh to more healthcare centers, hospitals, and clinics in the country while also finding opportunities to work with UNICEF country offices — strengthening their initiatives around vaccinations. We are also currently working with the World Health Organization (WHO) and UBS Optimus Foundation to replicate our model for the Rohingya camps.

Photo Credits | Top: © UNICEF/UN0149109/Brown | In Article: mPower