About Project
Vital Pakistan Trust is a public health organization that aims to save and improve the lives of mothers and children in Pakistan. We currently serve the coastal communities of Karachi, through innovative research and service delivery.
Region
Pakistan
Industries
Healthcare
Technologies
App Design & Development
THE CHALLENGE
Reducing child mortality through an integrated digital platform
Vital is dedicated to reducing the neonatal mortality rate in impoverished peri-urban communities through an integrated service delivery model that captures the actual impact backed by first hand-collected datasets.
Neonatal mortality is a grave challenge faced by public health. According to Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2017-18, the neonatal mortality rate of Pakistan is 42 deaths per 1000 live births while the Under 5 mortality rate is 74 per 1000 live births. Further, UNICEF has labeled Pakistan as one the most riskiest places for the birth of a newborn across the globe.
Such dismal health indicators require seamless and accurate data acquisition through the care journey to ensure that timely services can be provided to the pregnant mother and her newborn.. Currently, the data available for this resides on paper, is difficult to link across different services such as household surveillance through the VITAL registry, antenatal care services, or physician services available at the primary health care center and hence has limited actionability. The VITAL aims to digitize all that data to help in robust data generation that assists in quick decision making, provide quality care, and eventually saving the lives of mothers and children. Digitization of the data can aid healthcare workers to track the affectees closely, streamline responses, and make informed data-driven decisions.
THE SOLUTION
Integrating the data into one intuitive app
We built a digital solution for longitudinal data collection and patient monitoring, which is now serving as a powerful tool to save and improve the lives of women and children in the suburbs of Karachi.
The Vital team reached out to VentureDive in November 2018 with an existing app having limited functionality. Based on several months of user feedback and field observations, the team had identified the challenges of the existing system and had started envisioning a system with broader functionality to capture various aspects of the mother and child’s care journey at their field sites.. After a series of meetings with our dedicated core team consisting of a project manager, QA expert, designer, architect, android engineer, and a backend engineer, a detailed plan including the approach to development and design to pull off an optimal platform was designed. Through this platform, VITAL. aimed to facilitate the frontline health worker to document and share information, and in coordinating and supporting the provision of high-quality healthcare services in a resource constrained setting.
As their technology partner, VentureDive began the development of an android tablet application that connects with Open SRP. Open Smart Register Platform is an open-source mobile health platform that allows frontline healthcare workers to electronically register and track the health of their entire client population.
Using mHealth best practices, i.e. automated reminders and reporting, and decision support, OpenSRP builds on existing robust mobile technologies to deliver a powerful and dependable application for frontline health workers. It empowers them to more effectively deliver and account for the care they provide to their clients.
Our main focus was to deliver a user-friendly, modular platform that covers the complete 1,000-day journey of a mother and child.
THE IMPACT
Frontline health workers are empowered to deliver evidence-based care and collect data across a range of healthcare services in a single system. We also established a system that enabled process evaluation for our healthcare workers to monitor their completed tasks, time worked on the field, etc.
The application is live in 5 sub-urban communities of Karachi, with a total population of 0.3-0.5 million.
Since 2021, Vital Pakistan has:
- Registered 600,000+ women and children on its digital platform
- Conducted and recorded 179,000+ children’s vaccinations
- Facilitated 24,000+ physician visits
- Visited 231,114 households
- Conducted and recorded 157,170 antenatal care (ANC) visits
- Expanded the app’s usage to 65 locations across Karachi
- Reached a total of 344 app users
The aim is to scale the platform to several underprivileged communities across Karachi to improve care delivery for mothers and children, ultimately reducing neonatal mortality.
