A childhood incident left a lasting impression on Swati Humbad (25), a senior associate at Morgan Stanley, Mumbai. One of the maids in her house, who barely missed work, did not come for five days in a row. The family later learnt that her five-year-old child had contracted measles and there were complications. While the child was eventually saved, Ms. Humbad realised the importance of spreading awareness about timely vaccination in the low-income group.
While pursuing her Bachelors of Engineering in Information Systems from BITS, Pilani, she participated in an annual global competition that aims to solve one social issue every year using technology. She pitched a model focusing on making inexpensive generic medication available to patients of diabetes, anaemia and lifestyle diseases in low socio-economic communities. Although her prototype did not win, it gave her life a new direction.
After her graduation, Ms. Humbad joined Morgan Stanley in 2015 and in February 2016, became a technology volunteer with SNEHA, an NGO working on neonatal and infant health and Morgan Stantley’s Healthy Cities partner.
During one of her field visits, she casually asked a mother her child’s birth date. The mother could not recollect it and ended up confusing it with her nephew’s. “This left me stunned and made me think if the mother cannot remember the birth date of her own child, it would be really difficult to follow a vaccination schedule,” says Ms. Humbad, who decided to find a solution involving a basic mobile phone with a feedback mechanism. This gave birth to FollowApp, which she pitched at Technophilia, an annual Morgan Stanley India innovation competition that attracts creative minds across technology. The idea was vetted by senior MDs at a shark tank-themed event, and a part of Technophilia and was unanimously approved.
That set off the implementation phase, where a virtual team was formed from different offices of Morgan Stanley in India, led by Ms. Humbad, to build the initial prototype. After three months of rigorous efforts and with donations and funding from Morgan Stanley, FollowApp was developed, and it won the first prize at Technophilia 2016.
Automated reminders
FollowApp is a web application that makes automated, personalised voice calls in vernacular languages to remind caretakers about their children’s scheduled vaccinations based on their age, while recording their responses. If they don’t answer or respond with a ‘no,’ the software makes follow-up calls after three, five and 10 days. “In India, most families have at least one mobile phone on which incoming phone calls are free. This was a big factor in designing how FollowApp works,” says Siddharth Rathod, who handles development operations.
FollowApp launched its pilot project in May 2017 at Malwani, a high-density settlement in Mumbai’s western suburbs where 100 mothers were part of the initial rollout. By November-end, FollowApp has reached out to 800 mothers. “It is making calls for eight vaccines, for three different doses,” says Mehezad Lahewala, Technology Lead.
Challenges
There have been hurdles throughout the journey. Being a first-of-its-kind initiative, FollowApp faced rollout issues. In the start, it had a disappointing hit ratio. “Only 10-15% of mothers answered positively. That is when we interviewed mothers, asked for their feedback and came up with two major problems: The timing of the call initially was early morning. It turned out that the mothers didn’t find it convenient,” says Kartik Pai, Lead Developer. “After interacting with them we changed the call time to a more convenient one of around noon, and we saw a significant improvement in our hit ratio,” says Sandeep Dhanuka, Developer.
“FollowApp is operating in the social sector space, hence we had to keep our cost as low as possible in order to scale up,” says Havan Agrawal, another Developer. The highest cost component of FollowApp relates to the calls. “Initially, we were using Exotel, which charged us approximately Rs. 1.4 per call. If we had to make millions of calls, this would not have been a sustainable model and hence, we began to try different routes. The first was to talk to Exotel and explain why we wanted to reduce the cost. But it didn’t work out. The second was to implement our own IVR service provider, but that meant reinventing the wheel, so we finally went ahead with another Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service provider called Imimmobile, which provides a call cost of approximately Rs. 0.6 a call,” says Shanks Srinivasan, mentor of the team.
Creating an impact
Within six months of its launch, the app has already made an impact. Says Malwani resident Farhana Khan (name changed), “My first child could not get vaccinated on time as I was not aware of its importance; nor did I remember the timings. The timely reminders have helped me get my second child get vaccinated on time.”
“FollowApp not only acts as a reminder but also as a tracker. The data captured is extremely powerful because it captures the vaccination status of each child for each vaccine,” says Ms. Humbad. The future plan, she says, is to share the data with the Government of India to help them create critical healthcare policies. “FollowApp has the potential to impact millions across the country.”
Snapshot:
FollowApp
Founder: Swati Humbad
Team: 7
Funding: Donations; CSR
