Rapid Pregnancy Data Retrieval and Consultation Service

In Bangladesh, only 26 percent of women receive the recommended ANC support and only 27 percent receive postnatal care. This is a very small number of what is ideally expected. And a number of millions of faces are added annually due to unplanned pregnancy.  

A high number of marriages in rural Bangladesh happen below 18 years which is the legal age for marriage. This causes teenage pregnancy which seriously affects the health of mother and child. Added to this 71 percent of the births happen at home and only 4 percent are attended by any skilled professional. This is mainly due to an infrastructural and human resource gap in the healthcare system of Bangladesh. Every year we lose 7,660 women from preventable causes relating to pregnancy and childbirth which could have been prevented via quality access to healthcare.

Maternal and postnatal healthcare is a huge challenge in Bangladesh and in other developed and underdeveloped parts of the world. Every year number of children who are born dead or maternal health is crucially affected in Bangladesh. This is largely observed in the rural and underprivileged areas of Bangladesh where access to proper quality healthcare is still not present. Due to not finding the right information on food and proper maternal practice and the right healthcare professional at the right times due to lack of internet usage knowledge, every year a large number of pregnant women and infants suffer. Our solution Marri-Chaya is here to solve this problem of lack of quality healthcare due to limited health-related infrastructure and lack of the right number of health professionals that are needed to effectively help all the pregnant women in rural and underprivileged areas.

• The solution proposed by our project the Matri-Chaya Initiative is to create a universal pregnancy health card for all rural communities. Via the use of this card, they can make a health subscription from any mobile phone or drop by at any health booth of Matri-Chaya. After this, they can receive 24/7 health services and recommendations via calling our given emergency helpline and also take the pregnancy health card which can be scanned from our website by any physician and their health status can be retrieved instantly continuous monitoring of their health can be done whereby the physician can input the diagnosis and this is added to their overall health status. In addition, we will not only store data but also provide health ratings based on doctor assessments.

Our solution serves the rural and underprivileged women of Bangladesh. These women are mostly underserved due to the lack of the right amount of Health infrastructure and oftentimes their homes are far away from the nearest health clinics. Added to this oftentimes the women do not have the financial support or time to go visit the health service. We simply do this by bringing the healthcare to doorsteps.

• Our team consists of one product designer and development expert who has previous experience in designing health care-based solutions. In addition to this, the team has a product and business manager who is in charge of understanding the features and requirements of the product and taking care of the delivery. Added to this we have access to an internal network of the best physicians who give us the right information and advise on how to design the input forms and the output designs that will most effectively benefit the consumers. Our technical advisors are professors and engineers from some of the most reputed universities in Bangladesh who advise us on the technical aspects such as data security and management and other issues. 

• We hope to gain benefits from the legal and market barriers in our solution. We want to connect to more like-minded partners in our community who are working with similar solutions so that we can progress further through collaboration in business or in technology.  In addition to that, we also hope to gain funds that can give us some extra boost in implementing our solution. 

Our solution leverages the use of QR code based pregnancy health card that can be scanned anywhere and everywhere to gain rapid access to the maternal health of any individual. As opposed to the current system whereby the patient has to repeatedly give all the health information every time she visits the doctor and carry all the reports and documents, now the documents stay in our system and the actual health condition can be found instantly by scanning the QR code in the pregnancy health card. Furthermore where the patient and her family had to fix the ambulance and all other amenities in the middle of the night, now out instant helpline can be called and the service can be provided from our side where we contact the nearest ambulance provider. This is the significantly improved approach to the problem.

• In the next year we want to expand to 5 slums in the Dhaka city and 5 rural villages and serve 2500+ pregnant women. 

• In the next 5 years we hope spread all over Bangladesh. We plan to serve 22,000+ underprivileged and rural women through our service.

1. We have conveyed the idea and the detailed work to target women who have validated the product and expressed positive opinions on the products,

2. We have validated the subscription pricing of the product,

3. We are constantly increasing the number of technology and healthcare experts who care benefit our solution,

4. Our technical expert is developing the solution where the solution is in the prototyping phase and is being developed at the moment.

5. Feedbacks from the prototype users

• Via our solution, there will be a larger number of women who will be having a pregnancy health card. Due to this, the time taken for the assessment of maternal health will be maximized. This means that the time given by a doctor now for assessing can be used to ask more useful questions as the answers and records of the basic questions are already present in our system which can be easily accessed by the doctors. This makes the assessment quality increase and a more transparent assessment. Furthermore, all the prescriptions can be directly stored in our system so there is no risk of losing important health information and medicine records. In the long term, the use of our product will be making the rural communities much more responsible and increase the overall awareness about maternal and post maternal healthcare and healthcare overall. Through the data collected in our system, we will effectively be able to provide support in the important decision-making process of other NGO and governmental initiatives via a data-rich approach.
  

• We will be using a website and mobile application for this solution. The base technology and innovation that powers our solution is the QR code. Our solution generate rapid QR codes and instantly makes pregnancy health card via analyzing the national identification card possessed by all the citizens. This uses image processing. SMS technology is used to send awareness about maternal healthcare to all and the emergency helpline will be allowing any time access to healthcare professional no matter where one lives. 

• Our core team contains women as the head of technology and through this we empower women in technology and leadership. 

• Our solution is targeted toward a diverse social and cultural group who are underprivileged and often ignored and empowers them,

• Ur other stakeholders are the physicians who are mostly women who assess maternal health in clinics and other booths.

• Our system welcomes marginalized and underprivileged women by empowering them with technology.

• Ours will be a subscription based model whereby the user can take a monthly subscription payable by an mobile financial system or a one time fee for lifetime use.

• As of now we are looking for three mode:

1. Donations and funding,

2. Subscription services,

3. And future angel investments

As of now, our idea is in the prototyping phase and hence we are not charging any subscription fees. However in the near future when we release it officially then the subscription fee will be 50 takas per month for the users. Added to that we hope to get in angel investment.