Impact Evaluation of Medic Mobile’s Intervention in Baglung District

Background

Medic mobile (MM) has been working towards improving the health outcomes of people, to be precise, disadvantaged community through innovations in information and communication management. In 2013, MM with the alliance to MoH and one heart worldwide piloted “m-health platform”, mobilizing 77 female community health volunteers (FCHVs) from 4 village development committees (VDCs) in Baglung district. After a pilot study in 2015, the intervention was expanded across the district. Currently, 950 FCHVs and 122 health workers across all 61 village VDCs of Baglung are using the MM tools. This gave a platform which provided features such as, e-registration of pregnant women, sending automated reminders to FCHVs to counsel the pregnant women for ANC visits and allowing FCHVs to send visit confirmation, report danger signs and delivery with the location.

HERD International acting as the evaluator is looking at different evaluation areas such as the planning and organization of the Medic mobile’s intervention, service uptake, relevance, effectiveness, costing, sustainability, lesson learned and unintended impact. Our study will use a pre-post design to measure the effectiveness of the programme and the attainment of its goal which is comparing periods before and after the intervention.

General objective

To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of Medic Mobile’s tools and services to the community health system in Nepal, especially in the area of MNCH.

Research questions

1. What changes can be observed in the utilization of antenatal care (ANC) and institutional births in all the health facilities of Baglung where Medic Mobile tools are being used?
2. To what extent has the use of Medic Mobile tools contributed to improving the utilization of ANC services and institutional births in Baglung District?
3. How relevant, effective, costly and sustainable is the medic mobile toolkit?

Methodology

The methodology we employed is a mixed-method study, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches to collect and analyze data. Qualitative data collected for the study included semi-structured interviews (SSIs) with central and district level stakeholders, health facility workers and beneficiaries (pregnant women during the intervention) and female community health volunteers (FCHVs).  Also, focus group discussions (FGDs) with FCHVS was conducted in the study. The qualitative data collected from different categories of participants will help to understand the intervention, its relevance, effectiveness, and sustainability. The quantitative data collected for the study included a review of the medic mobile platform data, HMIS data which includes collecting data from the district, health facility (HF) records and FCHV registers. Quantitative data collected will help to see the changes in ANC and institutional delivery (ID) uptake before, during and after the MM intervention implementation.

Expected outcome

The expected outcome of the project was a final report which ultimately will help inform government officials, Medic Mobile’s partners and other stakeholders on the feasibility and effectiveness of the medic mobile’s tool for its scale-up.

Project focal person and team members

This project’s focal person is Ms. Abriti Arjyal