MomCare Connect

Our Initiative: MomCare Connect

Indonesia, the fourth most populous country all over the world, with more than 17.000 islands which are dispersed across the country, still has a lot of room for improvement in access to healthcare. The challenging access impacts vulnerable groups residing in rural areas, including pregnant mothers. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) an estimated 287,000 maternal deaths happened in 2020 globally, and a total of 48,000 cases of maternal death occurred in Central and Southern Asia (WHO, 2023). In Indonesia alone, the Indonesian Ministry of Health (MoH) reported 4,627 maternal deaths in 2020 and 7,389 maternal deaths in 2021, with 2,982 of those deaths due to COVID-19 infection (Indonesian Ministry of Health, 2021). 

We have developed a pilot project called Kotak Dokter (english: Doctor's Box) to address this issue. It is simply a box containing essential medical tools to assess and evaluate patients, including pregnant mothers, with a device (laptop/tablet). The device will be utilized by the community health workers (CHWs), midwives, or nurses, which will visit the patients, and using the device, they will contact specialized doctors (ob-gyn) and enable the patient to consult to their specialists. The Doctor's Box is a practical way to improve rural maternal care by allowing pregnant women to see a doctor online; even living in an area where limited doctors are practicing. 

The target population are the pregnant mothers (maternal) and the healthcare providers. Since Indonesia is geographically dispersed and challenging natural environment (hills, mountains, forest); as a result, there are still pregnant mothers who are living in the rural areas which have limited access to adequate health care. This becomes a problem because they need more time to commute or transport to the closest facilities - delaying the treatment or consultation they should have had.

This MomCare connect, as telemedicine service, will hopefully address this issue. We hope for the patients to have a better health outcome, and the healthcare providers to gain new knowledge while also enabling collaboration within communities.

We developed our telemedicine application, collaborate with provincial government to implement digital health solution in community health centers, doing pilot program in several community health centers. 

It has been a successful movement to be implemented by the government and local leaders, especially in a collaboration with the Digital Village innovation. The response and enthusiasm of patients as well as health workers at community health centers in using this telemedicine service was very positive and people felt the benefits of using it. The West Java provincial government committed approximately USD 6,253.35 for doing this telemedicine pilot project. For the evaluation, we managed to be supported by the funding from Harvard University with the amount of $5000. Our team consisting of medical doctors with added backgrounds of maternal and global health, economic, policy, implementation and data science. 

Our solution has been implemented as a pilot project in West Java province. It has been a successful movement to be implemented by the government and local leaders, especially in a collaboration with Digital Village innovation. The response and enthusiasm of patients as well as health workers at community health centers in using this telemedicine service was very positive and people felt the benefits of using it.

We built a software telemedicine application on the iPad (Apple device), and these apps can easily connect doing virtual consultation from one iPad to another. We’ve made sure that obstacles could be overcome by doing a prior pilot project implementation in several community health centers to validate our technology. 

Furthermore, with the funding that has been given to us, other than successfully implemented the pilot project, we also managed to evaluate it through research. The component of the pilot project has covered two regencies, three sub-districts, >20 villages, >10 healthcare providers, >15 midwives, >124 cadres, three community health centers ("Puskesmas"), >176 neighborhoods, >352 online consultations. 

We are looking to learn how to represent our solution, create network with community with the same goal, learn how to scale up the intervention, gain mentorship from experienced mentors, and also learn how to receive funding to support the sustainability of our innovation. 

Our telemedicine application is a cost-saving and a convenient alternative that provided greater access to clinical care for those who are underprivileged in rural areas. This enables the country to reach broader communities in order to aim for improving maternal services and health equity.

Empowering health care providers (community health workers, midwives, nurses, specialists including ob-gyn) by trying to be the intermediary to give the best of us to be impactful for anyone, especially those who need it the most in the rural areas, by providing health education, initiating health and social programs for society, collecting real hero stories in rural areas, and providing funding or donations.

For the beneficiaries, we will improve equity. We uphold the value of equity in organization, and also in every aspect of the activities carried out. We are focusing on improving health equity and helping people who really need it, especially for those who live in rural areas or resource-limited settings.

1. Increasing the number of beneficiaries and following up on their health outcome.

2. Widening the coverage of the provincial that the MomCare Connect will help.

3. Integrate telemedicine as the primary health care system strengthening tool and create adequate and effective maternal care. 

4. Create an impact evaluation feature in the dashboard for monitoring and evaluation of the program.

The healthcare providers will work with: (1) Device, for instance, Apple device (iPad) with a specified application for telemedicine (2) Essential medical equipment.

Full-time staff: 

Ana Mariana, MD (Founder and Chief Executive Officer)

Dwita Nitoya Esterini, MD (Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer)

Marwatunnisa Al Mubarokah, MD (Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer)

Roni Dwi Herdianto, MD (Advisory Board)

Cokorda Raka Gekko Dananjaya, MD (Advisory Board)

2 years.

We have an interdisciplinary team of 5 full time members, consisting of the executive and advisory board. Five of us are medical doctors, however, we have various background in data science, implementation research, economic and policy.

100% of the team members live in Indonesia where the solution is deployed. We are open to recruiting more team members and volunteers. 

We have spent over more than a year to refine our solutions in the field.  

Our business model is B to G (business to government). We are collaborating with the government so we can provide digital healthcare services for free to patients. However, there are some limitations to collaborate with the government and will impact its sustainability due to cost reduction, so we are trying to pivot to B to C (Business to Customer). Since now, we only get grants from the Government for doing the telemedicine implementation in a total 3 community health centers as part of the digital health village program in West Java Province.

1. Improving scalability and enable interoperability within provincial government. 

2. Create relationship with potential donors, for instance, the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with companies.

3. Raise funding from multi-year, grants from foundations in Digital Health, Maternal Health, and Primary Healthcare domains. 

4. Plan to find an opportunity to work with development partners such as World Health Organization, World Bank, and UNICEF. 

5. Finding opportunities for research-based funding which primary target is Indonesia to evaluate the impact of the program.