Assessing the Impact of Mobile Phone Technology to Improve Health Nutrition and Population (HNP) Service Utilization in Rural Bangladesh Through Pilot Intervention

Summary

1. Burden:

In global perspective, it is estimated that the lives of 150,000 women could be saved each year worldwide with access to sufficient family planning services. It is indicated that only 26 percent women received four or more antenatal care (ANC) visits during their pregnancies, while 67.7 percent received at least one ANC during their pregnancies which are the great challenges for ensuring safe motherhood in the country. As a part of safe motherhood, it is estimated that only 28.8 percent deliveries are being conducted in health facilities in the country. In case of postnatal care (PNC), from 2008 to 2010, only 27 percent of women received PNC for their last deliveries from a medically-trained provider within two days of their delivery. Despite the tremendous success of expanded programme on immunization (EPI) in Bangladesh, a substantial number of children are not fully vaccinated under EPI as data shows 82 percent were fully vaccinated by the age of 12 months.
2. Knowledge gap:

Use of technology for covering all or major components of primary health care (PHC) is yet to be developed and tested in Bangladesh. Further, no such initiative has yet been taken focusing community clinic (CC) to ensure equity of services in Bangladesh.
3. Relevance:

At present in Bangladesh, the CCs cater the services on family planning, maternal neonatal and child health (MNCH), health education for the rural people by using e-health strategy as the community health care provider (CHCP), newly recruited staff of community clinic are equipped with internet connected laptop service. So, updated technology for updating information, follow up and referral in primary health care can be used to increase the utilization of health services.

Hypothesis (if any):

Use of smart phones by community level healthcare providers will increase utilization of reproductive health (RH) and family planning (FP), MNCH, integrated management of childhood illness (IMCI), EPI and other PHC services at rural communities in Bangladesh.

Objectives:

To develop and test a mechanism as well as assess the impact of mHealth strategy to improve RH and FP, MNCH, IMCI, EPI and other PHC services in rural communities of Bangladesh.

Methods:

The service delivery personnel who are providing the services to the community people at different levels (community clinic, union health and family welfare centre, upazila health complex) will be equipped with smart phones having the facilities for text messages, voice messages as well as internet and data capturing. Training on handling of the smart phones, data capturing and monitoring will be provided to service providers in each upazila. They will be trained to input, edit, verify and monitor the data on different services through the software installed in their smart phones. The community clinic management and support groups will be oriented and motivated on mobile phone based registration, notification and referral to the health facilities.

Outcome measures/variables:

This will be a quasi-experimental pre-post design study and evaluation will be done through comparing antenatal care (ANC), postnatal care (PNC), and contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) and EPI coverage before and after its implementation in the study versus comparison areas. The study will be conducted over a period of 30 months.

Conditions

• Maternal Health
• Child Health
• Vaccination
• Family Planning Services

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Impact of Mobile Phone Technology to Improve Health Nutrition and Population (HNP) Service Utilization in Rural Bangladesh

1. Identification and registration of pregnant women and services for them 2. Birth notification 3. Childhood vaccination services under EPI 4. Newly married couple identification 5. e-Referral. 6. e-monitoring

Sponsors & Collaborators

• International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Jasim Uddin, PhD · International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

45 Years

Sex

FEMALE

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2016-04-30

Primary Completion

2022-10-31

Completion

2022-10-31

Countries

• Bangladesh

Study Locations