Description of Session
Over the past few years, Dimagi has worked with the government of India to deploy a mobile application built on the CommCare platform to over 300,000 nutrition workers in rural and urban communities across the country. The nutrition workers active on the application span eight states in India and submit around 2 million forms a day for the 200,000,000 beneficiaries currently registered in the system. The Indian government continues to scale the nutrition application with the goal of reaching all 1.4 million nutrition workers in India, who collectively serve over a billion people across the country. This radical scale up represents an absolute departure for the mhealth sector where funding limitations and implementation challenges have historically limited the size of most projects. However as the sector matures, more large scale projects are likely and they are necessary to ensure universal health care for the billions of people served by a front line health worker. In this session we explore the costs associated with scaling an mhealth solution to 300,000 users, considering the vast sums required for servers, hardware, training and technical support. We compare our budget estimate at the project's inception to our total spend to date to identify the biggest budgetary surprises and mistakes. We use our learnings to propose a Total Cost of Ownership model for scaled mhealth programs that can be adopted and modified by governments and implementers committed to digital transformation of healthcare in developing countries. (Dimagi is a technology company whose mission is to enable substantial worldwide impact by creating digital products that support global development efforts and help accelerate the end of extreme poverty. )
