Palmtops for Navi Mumbai midwives

These auxiliary nurse and midwives (ANMs) at 20 urban health posts (UHP) serve a population of about 12 lakh in urban and semi-rural Navi Mumbai,including 44 villages. They need a lot of time only to track the beneficiaries of NNMC schemes for pregnant woman and manually note down details in their ‘daily diaries’.

What suffers is the 15 to 16 services on offer,ranging from emergency deliveries,family planning motivation,identification of women needing medical termination of pregnancy and immunisation for children. “They cannot concentrate on delivering services as their time is consumed in feeding data,maintaining records and preparing reports,” said Dr Paropkari,NMMC medical officer.

Now,the palmtops will replace those paper-based records at all urban health posts. The NMMC has bought 65 Asus P320 PDAs with GPS technology at Rs 15,000 each for now. “Healthcare workers are being trained to use the PDAs. With access to the Internet,these will improve productivity of the ANMs,” said G V Rao,executive engineer (electrical) of the NMMC.

“ANMs travel to the remotest villages like Belapur,Agroli,Divala and Sanpada and also slums like Subhash Nagar before reporting to their health post,” said Dr Paropkari. “Data will now be fed into the PDAs in a set format.”

Once such details are entered,the midwives can check anytime if and when she needs an injection,or if she needs to be put into the high-risk category. After delivery,the data will include whether the child is immunized or has any infection.

“This model was experimented in Nagpur,Solapur and even Aurangabad,but it has not picked up. We have worked on the drawbacks and introduced the most important feature,an alert system. As soon as an ANM tracks a new beneficiary,her profile is fed in and automatically alerts are generated for follow-ups,” said Paropkari.

Midwives will soon directly upload data into their palmtops and generate reports instantly. “This system will help reduce human errors and malpractice. Once entered,the data get locked and can be changed only with permission from authorities,” said Dr Paropkari.