(An ANM conducting the antenatal check-up for a pregnant woman in the sub-center)

With our recent collaboration with Govt. of Odisha, NITI Aayog (GOI) and NGO Sankalp, MedTel Healthcare aims to reach 200K ANMs (Auxiliary Nurse Midwives) and 25 million pregnant mothers each year.

Conditions like Gestational Diabetes Mellitus, Pregnancy Induced Hypertension, Anaemia and other nutritional problems make about 30% of pregnancies in India high-risk. A “high-risk” pregnancy is when a pregnant lady has one or more conditions that raise her, or her baby’s, chances for health problems or preterm delivery. This might lead to consequences such as stillbirth, reduced growth of babies, risk of developing diabetes and many other health risks for both, the mother and the child. Some 0.34 million of the 1.9 million stillbirths globally in 2019 were in India, making it the country with the largest such burden, according to the first joint estimates released by a number of United Nations agencies October 8, 2020.

While there is no way to completely eradicate all risk from such a pregnancy, these can be managed effectively, by routine monitoring and analysing parameter trends of a patient.

MedTel Healthcare in collaboration with the government of Odisha and Sankalp (an NGO) supported by NITI Aayog’s Aspirational Districts Programme, has pioneered a connected care programme in the district of Balangir where ANMs at sub centres will be supplemented with a set of connected devices that they can use to regularly monitor high-risk pregnancies in real time. The mobile based platform coupled with clinical algorithms and predictive analytics, helps in the risk stratification for various pregnancy related conditions. It also works in offline mode enabling ANMs to work even in areas without network connectivity and internet services.

They aim to reimagine healthcare by changing how care is delivered and making it more accessible and personalised even in the most remote areas.

Enabling Regular Monitoring: Regular monitoring of parameters like Blood Pressure, Blood Sugar, Weight, Haemoglobin and Fetal Heart Rate and Urine are crucial indicators of the mother and baby’s health and development. Currently, because of problems of accessibility, expense, lack of awareness or complacency, there is no specific schedule in which these vitals are tracked. Along with this, maintaining these records is a bigger challenge due to the bulk of the data available. Tracking these vitals routinely will not only help pregnant women understand their health better but also help their healthcare providers detect complications faster to take timely action and prevent unwanted consequences associated with pregnancies, especially high-risk ones. With a simple set of devices that can easily be connected to a phone and monitor a large set of vitals at once, this model simplifies the process of monitoring, recording and tracking vitals.

Condensing A Pool Of Data To Generate Actionable Insights: The data collected through these devices is digitised which makes it easy to handle and process. Based on this data, insights specific to a patient and population are generated which then enable the government to plan and allocate resources and support needed.

Robust And Highly Scalable Model: While the functionality this system offers to monitor high-risk pregnancies remotely is wide, the ease of use is what makes it so robust and highly scalable. The ANMs are given a kit of devices, which includes a blood pressure monitor, glucometer, haemoglobinometer, fetal heart rate monitor, urine dipsticks and a body analyzer, which when connected to MedTel’s app captures and analyzes the data within seconds. With very little training and resources, such a system can ensure that no complication of a high-risk or a low-risk pregnancy goes undetected.

Way Forward: MedTel plans on implementing its pregnancy solution pan India and improving the quality of life of every mother and child. The aim is to make healthcare during pregnancy accessible in even the remotest of locations, affordable to all sections of the population and make the process of delivering healthcare easy and effective for the healthcare providers. MedTel being a disease and device agnostic company, is working with different state governments and development partners for tele-health, smart health screening and remote patient monitoring.