Managing pregnancy in the times of the pandemic, the digital way

Every 10 minutes an expecting mother dies in India due to lack of infrastructure, access to quality care and experts. 60 percent of these deaths are due to high risk pregnancies. We lose more than half a million newborns every year and mainly due to preterm birth and birth asphyxia. Both for mother and babies we need quality pregnancy care, regular check-up and infrastructure which can overcome barriers and enable healthcare providers to offer care.

CareMother provides pregnancy related remote monitoring, decision support tools to frontline workers and doctors of healthcare organisations. At times, they are used by expecting mothers themselves. The organisation has grown consistently over the last 3 years and now offer solutions to almost all states of India and recently started pilots in Bangladesh, Nigeria and Afghanistan. EC speaks with Shantanu Pathak, Co-Founder, CareMother.

How many deliveries CareMother would have executed, since its inception ?
CareMother with all its solutions has aided more than 100,000 pregnancies through close to 1000 healthcare providers. These expecting mothers have received at least one check-up/consultation through either of the CareMother solutions.

What are the various pregnancy resolution models offered by CareMother ?
CareMother is a digital health company offering pregnancy care solutions to healthcare providers and expecting mothers. Our mission is to create equal opportunities of care for women. Our digital and smart solutions for prenatal and postnatal care offer convenience to healthcare providers with remote monitoring, decision support tools and beyond the facility patient connect.

Expecting mothers and families receive care at their comfort at healthcare facilities or even at home due to our portable solutions. Our key offerings:

i. Fetal Monitoring at clinic with Fetosense: A wireless and portable smartphone based fetal monitor with Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered decision support, offers convenience to the doctor and mother, saves time and reduces expenditure on consumables and maintenance.

ii. Fetal Monitoring at home with BabyBeat: A DIY solution for expecting mothers during covid times to avoid exposure but still obtain medical grade fetal monitoring at home and remote support from doctor through our app.

iii. Comprehensive doorstep pregnancy care through AnandiMaa Platform: AnandiMaa enables frontline workers and nurses to offer doorstep pregnancy care at last mile as well as in cities for high risk pregnancies. We are specialised in early identification and management of high risk pregnancies.

One of the challenges that we faced from a business perspective is enhanced quality improvement practices and processes at the factory and hence we reached out to Marico Innovation Foundation(MIF) for their Scale-Up program to help us overcome the challenge.

Impact created by Marico Innovation Foundation: manufacturing capacity increased by 100 percent, transit damage rate reduced to 0 percent, reduction in customer resolution time by 50 percent.

Currently MIF is also working with the CareMother’s team on sales and distribution to increase revenues of Fetosense by 3x in FY22.

What benefits or ease does CareMother deliver to the pregnant mother’s family, extended family ? 
For every test performed we share all the information to expecting mothers on the ‘CareMother Pregnancy Tracker and Baby Growth App’ designed for expecting mothers/families. For example, Once the test is performed with any of our solutions, i.e.AnandiMaa, FetoSense and BabyBeat, expecting mother receives the link for our mobile app can listen to fetal heart sound, see the report card and she can share it with her family members as well through CareMother app.

For DIY home monitoring solution launched during covid pandemic, as per doctors, BabyBeat potentially saved lives of babies whose mothers were covid positive and faced irregularity in fetal heart rate. Further it helped them to monitor the fetal health when in isolation.

From the context of rural, last mile connectivity, families need not travel to block level or district level for regular check up. If identified as high-risk, they are informed early, which saves complications during labor. During the pandemic, when travel was restricted, local frontline workers with the AnandiMaa solution did home-visits for check-ups.

So whether you are visiting a clinic or at home or even in rural areas, CareMother helps families to receive quality care and help them to prevent complications.

What are some of the future innovations CareMother is working on ?
CareMother is working on AI powered auto-interpretation tools for early identification and management of conditions thus helping healthcare providers to make faster decisions and save future complications for pregnancies.