Innovative mobile application as a job aid that helps improve the performance of ASHAs through better supervision, support and motivation.

About ImTeCHO

77% Early Pregnancy Registration out of a total of 395,401 registration in the financial year 2022-23

99.52% hospital deliveries out of a total of 284,221 deliveries in the financial year 2022-23

90.83% fully immunized out of a total population of 990678 in the financial year 2022-23. Immunizations are related to OPV 0, Hepatitis B, BCG, Rota Virus, etc.

It adds more power and agency for the ASHA workers

Empowering ASHA workers, protecting the mother and child

ASHA workers, or Accredited Social Health Activists play a key role in delivering Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) services. The ImTeCHO app is an innovative mobile application that helps improve the performance of ASHAs through better supervision, support and motivation. All these lead to increased coverage of proven maternal, newborn and child health interventions among resource-poor settings in India. To conclude, ImTeCHO is aimed to provide support to all levels of individuals involved in the ASHA program starting from ASHAs to PHC staff to higher-level officials, so that their job is easier and more effective. All this is made possible by using a low-cost smartphone.

Solution

The initiative is an innovative intervention based on mobile phone technology (called m-Health) to help community-based health workers (called ASHAs), and Primary Health Centre (PHC) staff improve coverage of life-saving, community-based maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) services towards reducing maternal, newborn, and child, mortality and malnutrition and effectively managing morbidities in predominantly tribal and rural communities. It is a joint initiative between the Department of Health and Family Welfare (Government of Gujarat) and SEWA Rural, a voluntary service organization.

Sewa Rural and Argusoft worked together and created the ImTeCHO Application.

The project was implemented in three districts of Gujarat and a RCT was done by SEWA rural with the support of ICMR and WHO. The results published in leading global medical journal PLOS Medicine on 12 September, 2019 showed significant improvement in performance of the ASHA workers leading to 16% reduction in the infant mortality rate in one year.

The ImTeCHO mobile app integrates checklists (to ensure standardization of services) and other features such as the ability to transfer data instantly and apply algorithms automatically to the data entered and features to ensure checks and balances for truthfulness and accuracy of collection information. The application enables scheduling and task management, providing health workers with alerts on their mobile phones about the tasks to be completed every day. Further, the application extensively uses multimedia for health promotion. Short videos assist ASHA workers in counseling beneficiaries about key healthy behaviors during home visits. In addition, the ImTeCHO application has provisions for automated diagnosis, risk stratification and treatment. The application shows diagnosis and customized treatment plans based on entries made on the mobile phone.

The web interface provides real-time information to medical officers for providing timely support (e.g., medicines, high-risk patient tracking) and supervision, monitoring (timely information about beneficiaries who are left out) and incentive management.

Benefits

Coverage quality

Improved coverage & quality of MNCH services in hard-to-reach areas

Proven gains

Gains in behavior change communication, diagnosis

Improvement of services

Supervision & support of ASHA improved MNCH services

ImTeCHO as featured
in academic journals

  • mHealth intervention "ImTeCHO" to improve delivery of maternal, neonatal, and child care services - A cluster-randomized trial in tribal areas of Gujarat, India
  • High uptake of an innovative mobile phone application among community health workers in rural India: An implementation study
  • Accessing completeness of pregnancy, delivery, and death registration by Accredited Social Health Activists [ASHA] in an innovative mHealth project in the tribal areas of Gujarat: A cross-sectional study