1. Health for India is committed to solving a poor health care delivery and improving access to healthcare at public institutions in India. According to the study conducted by Esther Duflo, Professor of Development Economics at MIT, medical delivery tends to be quite dysfunctional in three ways: health worker’s are absent irregularly and unexpectedly (43% absent rate in state of Rajasthan); patients then start to guess whether it is worth visiting a public clinic, facing to a risk of doctor’s absence; it might lead to an increase in psychological and travel costs in addition to those charged by health care providers. This health workers' absenteeism can prevalently be seen at any region in developing countries. In response to the absenteeism, patients often give up being seen by the doctor and consequently pay a higher cost for private services or even decide not to take medical treatments. The project's target population will be elderly people and parents who take care of children because they will take the most benefit from the improvement.
2. Health for India is developing a SMS notification system that makes it possible for patients to know information of operating hours and days that is , in general, unavailable at public hospitals in India. Precisely, it will make monthly, weekly, and even daily message deliveries for patients to be able to react to a sudden change in operation hours or days. My team will partner with NGOs and health workers to expand the use of the mailing list in order to inform patients of accurate information. What is new and different about the design of Health for India from other programs is that it has a potential to discover distinguished cost effectiveness. Business as usual way of solving health workers's absenteeism would be merely to increase compensated wages or to hire more workers. Health for India will, however, focus on providing health workers incentives based on the number of message deliveries that has had correct information on hours of operation, and on the number of attendances of worker's at facilities.
3. Health for India expects to see a decline in probability of a patients' visiting empty facilities by 80%, a decrease in foregone earnings by 50% that could have been earned if they were to be informed correctly, and travel costs as well. If cost effectiveness mentioned before were proven, the project could be implemented in other states of India and other developing countries where the rates of health workers' absence is reportedly high. Thus, Health for India will take on a research perspective in order to extend its implementation to a further area and is committed to measuring causal effects of the implementation of the project on people's enhanced well-being by collecting both quantitative and qualitative data.
