FN Mobile MaternityCare

Most maternal deaths in Ghana occur in the rural areas as compared to urban areas. Low antenatal coverage, socio-cultural factors, lack of logistics, equipment, and blood at facilities, delay in making a decision to go to hospital, delay in arriving at the hospital, and a delay in getting treatment at a facility are the leading causes of such deaths. Our MaternityCare provides Mobile Maternity Units fully packed with consumables, medicines and equipment to facilitate the delivery of personalized pregnancy care, provide treatment for injuries and post-exposure prophylactic treatment to victims of sexual violence and provide community outreach programs such as STD awareness and testing campaigns. Our unique system of maternal care will ensure care is provided at the right time, at the right place, to minimize maternal suffering and child mortality.  Our heavy involvement of families, opinion leaders, youth and non-pregnant women in care delivery will help impact the solution.

In the northern Ghana alone, about 90% of the rural communities lack access to healthcare facilities. Although some communities have access to Community-Based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) compound, these compounds are not fully equipped to provide the standard maternal care a pregnant woman may need for safe delivery. Not to mention, the long distances these women have to travel to access the compound, the long waiting times and the unnecessary delays from healthcare workers at the facility, discourage them from being regular and prompt at the facility during their antenatal care period. In these limited-resource settings, pregnant women do not receive the full benefits of maternal health services, with the benefits waning towards the very deprived communities that may even lack access to electricity, water and basic food stuffs. As a result, these women resort to nearer-to-residence local birth attendants and herbalists who may not be well educated and skilled to provide the standard care and may also lack the equipment to detect any early signs of fetal health complications. The non standardized practice almost always results in the death of the woman during or shortly after birth and cause many preventable neonatal loss

FN MaternityCare uses interconnected mobile medical units to provide standard maternal care. In the rural communities, we capture the bio-profile  of female teenagers, pregnant women and postpartum women onto our unique core medical software. Our team matches each pregnant woman to a local midwife and external (urban) midwife and an obstetrician who will become their permanent care providers. The local midwife schedule all antenatal visits and upload them onto the system. During every door visit, the women will go through the routine checkups, scans and tests- results will be uploaded for the external team to access and then have extensive consultations through ZOOM with the women- all in our trailers. Female teenagers and postpartum women will also receive the needed sexual health education, and awareness and baby care education respectively through the local health workers. Our core medical software allows all registered trailers to share data among the health workers nationwide for the purpose of maternal and sexual health education and any important data related to the well being of the mother and child. Our beneficiaries also have 24/7 access to our services through simple toll-free telephone lines or calls to emergency number, 000.

Our Maternity Units bring high quality maternal care, sexual health education and campaign awareness to the very doorstep of every woman and female teenager living in rural communities. Communities which lack access to basic social amenities such as potable water, electricity, basic health care facilities and transport systems are captured into our project. Our unique care system uses the heavy involvement of the community chiefs, and elders, families of pregnant women, opinion leaders, youth and non-pregnant women in care delivery and utilization. We bring these stakeholders on board to discuss problems, pregnant women face, some socio-cultural barriers that hinders women from seeking full maternal attention, the reproductive health needs of the young females among many others. This helps us make strategic plans and policies that will help foster full involvement of all beneficiaries in the community to break any cultural boundaries, stigmatization to health care access and strengthen the rural maternal health. Our MaternityCare then provides care that is well tailored and specialized to every woman, girl child addressing their specific needs and concerns.

Most maternal deaths in the rural communities are directly related to causes such as hemorrhage, unsafe abortion, hypertensive disorders, infections, and obstructed labor. Lack of health care facilities, transport systems, and look warm attitude towards antenatal care contributes to these preventable maternal crises.

Our MaternityCare provides the standard maternal care to these women, ensuring both mother and child remain healthy after delivery. The care is highly comparable to the care women in highly developed urban areas receive and with an added advantage of it’s mobility structure providing the services at the very doorstep of every woman.

Our medical units will have extreme robust characteristics such as waiting areas, treatment rooms, delivery rooms and recovery rooms. These Units will be fully packed with consumables, medicines, equipment and a blood bank. The unit facilitates almost all medical and maternal procedures. The mobility nature of the trailer will bring high quality care to the doorstep of every beneficiary with 24/7 access.

We use a Core Medical System where all health workers operating in the trailers in different locations in the rural communities can share and receive pertinent health information for better care management. Our medical system integrated with mobile phone technology will alert these women via phone call or text message when their next visit is due. Lab tests, scans and checkup reports are uploaded into each woman’s profile account in the system which is assessed by the external team. The urban team using the smartphone phase of the system can quickly and easily review each antenatal visit reports of their assigned women and add their ‘comments’. This provides quality knowledge based-maternal care for every woman 

Each of our expectant mothers will have easy access to permanent highly qualified team in the urban areas through video consultations (ZOOM) during every antenatal visit.

We use mobile maternity trailers which have flexibility to cover large areas within the rural communities and provide the standard care of our expectant mothers

We are currently developing a core medical software that will connect all trailers deployed in the areas to enable the health care givers gain access to relevant data and information from one another in the country. The system will utilize a cloud storage and a push notification system for storage of data and, other statistics and alert beneficiaries of any news respectively. 

We will use toll free numbers and emergency short codes for the women to gain access to us, 24/7 without any hassle.

Our MaternityCare trailers are simply fully functional maternal clinics on wheels to cater for our expectant mothers in the rural communities.

Banks in the country use a core banking software/system that allows clients access their banking accounts and details anywhere in the country subject they have access to any branch of such banks. This systems are used coupled with smartphone applications for clients to access their bank details in hand anywhere, anytime.

We will use a similar software technology powered for medical purpose to allow the health care team in the highly developed urban areas gain access to their clients and their health records in the rural communities. ‘’The urban team upload their comments, the local midwives read them, quality care is given to mother’’. ‘’The local midwives upload reports, urban team reads them and provide their comments, quality care is given to mother’’. The system will facilitate an all day, every day, all time virtual connection between the local midwife, urban midwife,  urban obstetrician and the pregnant woman.

Quality Vans & Specialty Vehicles Company based in Arizona, USA, develops Maternity Outreach Mobile Unit  (MOMobile) for its client hospitals and clinics for use in their outreach programs. The MOMobile has an ultrasound machine, two fully-equipped exam rooms, an external fetal monitor and laboratory for testing. The Maternity Outreach Mobile is equipped to service: pregnancy tests, referrals, education, transportation, and immunization for children.

We believe we can create an environment where every expectant mother in the very marginalized rural communities in the country can gain access to high quality maternal and related care as would have those expectant mothers living in highly developed urban areas with highly ranked health care facilities. What we do is to give access to our mobile maternal trailers and health software to these expectant mothers

1. To gain access to a high standard ante-and post- natal care irrespective of their financial constraints, socio cultural backgrounds and other related barriers

2. To enjoy high quality services in the comfort of their homes while consulting with high profile health care workers from the urban areas

3. To improve their overall sexual health and life.

Our solution currently serves about 50 pregnant women in the Kpone-Katamanso District with our local midwives, maternity & child care nurses, and general practitioners making weekly travel visits to these women for antenatal care

With the introduction of the software and MaternityCare Units, we envisage to have the potential to capture all status ‘rural communities’ in the region of the solution’s headquarters. We aim to serve about 1.5 million women and female teenagers in these communities.

In five years, as we have advanced our services, technology and have more health experts on board, we envisage to reach about 10 million women and girls as our core system/software will play a critical role in the advancement of our reach.

Our goal within the first year is to create a unique standard approach to the delivery of antenatal care to the expectant mothers and storage of all resultant data. This is to ensure all captured women receive quality checkups, lab testings, and scans and up-to-date information and health advice on their pregnancies. 

We will focus on bringing as many urban health care practitioners on board to begin the pairing and matching of each woman to her team of health care workers and help facilitate the close work between the local midwives and the urban teams. This will ensure every woman gets all the high standard attentions during their pregnancy.

In the next five years, we should have reached pilot stages where our unique MaternityCare Mobile Trailers coupled with the Core Medical System/Software have been established and replicated in 95% of the captured rural communities in the different regions of the country and measuring impact of the solution for its re-orientation and scalability nation wide

Due to the nature of the solution and financial resources to facilitate its ongoing operations, we plan to partner with the National Health Insurance Authority under the Ministry of Health to enroll the female girls and expectant women under the insurance policy to help maintain a low cash flow into the organization for the maintenance of some technical operations.

1. Financial resources for the procurement of state-of-the-art Mobile Maternity Units from such companies.

2. Financial Constraints to award the Core Software Solution Contract to a highly reputable Software Engineering firm in the country or abroad 

3. Socio-cultural barriers that prevent pregnant women from seeking maternal care in orthodox healthcare facilities and the use of orthodox medical drugs and interventions in adverse situations.

1. Seek for support from development agencies both local and abroad

2. Liaise with the Government to authorize integrations of already existing CHPS compounds and related governmental interventions for a broader scope of impact

3. Local Chief Governance interventions coupled with heavy education and sensitization outreaches to break the barriers of using orthodox approaches to maternity care and childbirth

We have a 10 member team assigned different tasks on the project. 

2 team heads- Project Technical Head and Project Operations Head

1 Software engineer

3 medical practitioners 

3 midwives 

1 Medical Laboratory Scientist

The medical practitioners and midwives have extensive experience providing antenatal care to expectant mothers. These professionals have seen 98% of their clients through multiple successful childbirths. They have undertaken many voluntary medical and maternal outreach programs in health-facility deprived rural communities and are all multi-lingual hence able to communicate effectively in the local dialect.

The software engineer on the team has built some successful mobile applications and software for leading companies in the country that have earned a high rating on both google store and app store. Some of these apps have also received high clients and customer ratings. He’s currently helping us to source a team to work on the core medical software for our units.

The medical laboratory scientist on board has worked extensively with multiple maternity clinics, regional hospitals and tertiary hospitals in the country. His undisputed knowledge in laboratory quality control makes him perform laboratory tests in a high standard. He’s currently working on a sub-project concept that will allow medical drones facilitate the transfer of drugs, blood and blood products, test specimens and equipment among all trailers nation wide for restocking in emergency cases where some medical items run out in some trailers.

The two heads of the project have worked extensively on many outreach programs with the other members on many occasions and have formed a strong bond and positive attitude towards one another. They have the ability and skill to lead others in a group towards one common vision.

We have not partnered with any other organizations as yet. 

We use mobile maternity units (MoMobile) to deliver quality maternity care at the very doorstep of pregnant women and provide sexual health education and STD awareness, and testing campaigns and outreaches to female teenagers  in marginalized and rural communities 

Our unique Core Medical Software allows the local health care workers in the various Units share relevant information on clients care and management with one another across the nation and also give access to the matched external team of health care workers in the urban  areas to join in the delivery of the health care. 

Our partnership with the Ministry of Health, Ghana Health Service and other national stakeholders of the health sector will allow government health care professionals, posted to the rural communities work with us, while receiving their salaries from the government and some gifts and donations from the locals too. Our team of external medical professionals from the highly developed urban areas will be made of professionals who are willing to offer their services, voluntary and free-of-charge and will be signed onto our system.

Since solutions target poverty-driven rural communities, revenue will be generated from the National Health Insurance claims from the government, some organizational donations and monetary gifts.

Our business model will partner the NHIA to receive claims at the end of each fiscal year, which will serve as a primary source of income to finance some technical operations of the CareUnits.

We also plan on heavy outdoor of outreach programs and campaigns geared towards mass donations and funding in the urban areas and partnerships with other private local stakeholders of health all in a bid to raise money to cater for the unit operations.

One of the long term goals of the project- to be designed by the software engineering team - will be to develop a maternal health app for pregnant women in the urban areas to facilitate extension of more flexible mobile units in the urban areas for busy working expectant mothers who will not have the time and luxury to fulfill every antenatal appointment. Usage of the app coupled with some in-app purchase will generate some revenue to help us source some expense of our rural ventures.

We need guidance from giant companies who are already making impact on the maternal health of their respective countries. Assistance to fine tune our business model, other strategic plans and related innovated ideas and solutions from an experienced team who already have a high profile business, on how to make more impact in the rural communities we are expanding to serve.

We need international partnerships to help in the procurement of the mobile maternal units and the design and implementation of our core medical software.

These will ensure our services provided in the rural communities are of both national and international standard to help drive the nation towards meeting the SDG target of 70 per 100,000 live births at the end of 2030

We will like to partner companies specialized in building specialty mobile medical trailers and vans, which will help us in the construction of maternal units designed exclusively to fit our solutions- Quality Vans & Specialty Vehicles, USA and Lamboo Mobile Medical, Netherlands

We will like to partner companies that provide software solutions to help us design a well-secured core software to help scale up our venture- Microsoft, USA, Oracle, USA and IBM, USA

We will like to partner companies that specialize in the manufacturing of medical equipment and supplies to help us get these machinery and supplies at a reduced cost and expense- Sysmex Corporation, Japan, Abbott Laboratories, USA and Siemens Healthineers, Germany 

Companies that build and operate medical drones can help us procure such drones and help us educate and train some of our volunteers in the operation of such drones for our rural area venture. eg. Zipline

Our Mobile Maternity Trailers bring high quality maternal care to every woman living in the rural communities. Our unique maternal care approach is highly comparable to the care women in highly developed urban areas receive. Our unique software allows an endless connection between these pregnant women and their matched team of health care professionals. Our system allows for improvement in the assessment of the maternal health of these women since the health care team can easily upload their comments and explanations, send and share among themselves for wide access. Our team will use the prize to help fund the acquisition of the core medical software  as the software will be the most integral part of the solution