Opportunity: This project’s goal, part of a partnership between Medic Mobile (now called Medic) and the Development Medical Foundation (DMF) India – was to deploy an automated, SMS-based vaccination reminder system for mothers in underserved areas in the small town of Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh, India. This particular region is known for having low rates of total vaccination for infants, around 60% baseline, and the intervention was targeted at improving these numbers. DMF ran a small local vaccine clinic called the TIKA Clinic that served the neighborhoods in Kurnool with the lowest vaccination rates, but they knew they could do more to get the word out, and they suspected that mobile phones and text messaging could offer a way to do just that.

Year: 2011 – 2012

Role: Fellow, project co-lead

Process: I spent the summer of 2011 living in Kurnool with my colleague Nadia Hasham to research, design, customize, test, and implement the system as well as an accompanying clinical research trial. When we originally arrived in Kurnool, we were armed with only a skeleton clinical trial design and the support of Dr. Deepesh Vendoti, founder of DMF. After an intensive two months of exhaustive research with our wonderful community members – which sometimes required a lot of creativity and resourcefulness to accomplish! – and the input of many partners, we put together everything we learned to design both a comprehensive SMS system as well as an accompanying clinical program and research trial. I helped build the solution a bit, though much of it was built by Dieterich Lawson (then-CTO of Medic Mobile) using a modified version of PatientView and FrontlineSMS. By the end of summer, we had successfully launched the system at the TIKA Clinic.

Outputs: An automated SMS-based vaccination reminder system integrated into the TIKA Clinic’s digital patient record system, and a text message service open to the public that allowed anyone to text a child’s date of birth and receive a schedule of dates for full infant immunization.

A now-archived series of blog posts from us, written that summer, can be found here and describe our work and process in great detail. Additionally, an article by GOOD about our vaccination work can be found here, although there are a number of other articles that talked about this project as well.