Maternova: Connecting frontline providers to lifesaving tools and techniques

The information needs of frontline health care professionals are vast, ranging from the latest WHO protocols and country-level policies to knowledge of the newest life-saving technologies. Promising new technologies — including mobile health facilities; lightweight, portable diagnostic tools; solar-powered devices; and simple ways to save neonates — are emerging at a more rapid pace, but these developments are not centrally tracked. Such innovations are often reported in medical journals, but subscription requirements mean that this information is out of reach for many. In addition, most innovations are only written up once they are through testing and/or trials and not at the very early stages of their development. Thus, even after life-saving technologies are developed, a major barrier to use of these technologies still exists — knowledge of their existence. One solution: websites like Maternova.

Maternova is a new online knowledge-sharing platform (or “innovation portal”) that brings together social entrepreneurs who are developing or have developed life-saving technologies. The website allows all of their ideas and innovations to be documented in a single place. A number of these innovators are well known globally, but many of the innovations have only been uncovered after months of research. Now, innovators are starting to come to us through word of mouth.

As our name suggests, Maternova purposefully focuses on much-needed global access to information on maternal and newborn technologies. We also provide information on a variety of more general innovations — to us, anything that augments or expedites safe childbirth (for mother and infant) in the field is an innovation, including improvements in lighting, power, infrastructure, communication technologies, and, of course, health technologies. These are all part of a health system that can save mothers’ lives.

Three very basic questions guide our work. First, what are the effective, low-cost tools (both those in development and those on the market) that can save lives? Second, given the tools that exist, what are the priorities for new ideas? And third, where are the facilities located that can provide skilled care to women?

An example of a simple, low-cost, life-saving tool is a calibrated bag that is used to measure postpartum hemorrhaging, which is the leading cause of maternal death in low-resource settings. In these settings, there is often no way to measure how much blood a woman is losing during delivery — often midwives will simply look at how many cloths are soaked through with blood. A group in India developed a calibrated drape — a bag that simply collects the blood and measures volume of blood lost. This simple plastic bag can (with proper training of the birth attendant) help signal when a woman needs to be urgently referred to a higher level of care.

Mahmoud Fatallah eloquently stated a connection between maternal survival and human rights, saying “When women are risking death to give life, they are entitled to have their own right to life and health protected.” The rights to skilled care at birth, to measurement of what is going wrong in labor and delivery, to other life saving tools are all extremely concrete dimensions of the human right to health.

Our approach is extremely practical, and we rely upon reports from the field about new, simple technologies and about which techniques that are working. For example, through the Maternova site, we learned that a group in California has imported the drape concept from India and is now using it throughout the state.

We believe that by connecting the various groups already linking nurses, midwives, and physicians (including GHDonline’s Global Health Nursing and Midwifery Group) and exchanging concrete solutions, we can accelerate and amplify the kinds of exchanges described in the calibrated postpartum hemorrhage bag example. And looking forward, we would like to assist these groups in bringing their own priorities for innovation to the forefront of global health policy dialogue.

For more information, please visit http://maternova.net. To go directly to the tools for maternal health, please see http://maternova.net/tools/to-save-mothers, and for the tools for newborn health, please see http://maternova.net/tools/to-save-infants. For Structures and Systems, please see http://maternova.net/tools/structures-and-systems. And if you have a specific idea for an innovation to be featured in the Index, please send word through the comment section on the Maternova site.

Meg Wirth is the founder of Maternova and a S.E.VEN fellow. She has worked on women’s health and inequalities in health throughout her career in Appalachia, for John Snow International’s Mothercare project in Jakarta and South Kalimantan, Indonesia, and for the Rockefeller Foundation. She is also a co-author of the UN Millennium Project’s final report on child and maternal health titled Who’s Got the Power? She has a BA from Harvard University and an MPA in international development from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.