Building a sail at CareMother to realise the vision
Sadly, the principle that all human beings are equal seems to be limited in principle only. Can we bring life of dignity, beyond survival, to every human being? If yes, how can it be possible without ensuring quality healthcare to everyone which acts as a foundation for our very existence.
It’s with this larger vision in mind that the team of CareMother stepped into the arena of the healthcare delivery. Soon it was clear that a lofty dream of achieving equitable access to healthcare is not possible without special attention towards women’s wellness and care, as half of the total human population consists of them. Even so, the state-of-the-art healthcare services fall short to pay attention towards women’s health problems — let alone the problem of scarce healthcare coverage for women who come from resource constrained settings. This incompetence and inadequacy of healthcare industry compelled us to sharpen our focus towards the most prominent and impactful women health problem of all — the problem of enabling access to quality maternal and child care. To give you an idea of the gravity of the problem, know that out of over 3 million pregnancies each year only 21% receive basic checkups and counselling. Further, more than 60% of maternal mortality and morbidity is preventable through regular health checkups and timely treatments as per the research. Thus, we dove in the arena of maternal health with a mission to bridge the healthcare access gap and enhance its quality by making healthcare services personalised to individual women. It’s especially noteworthy that we are doing this in a time and space of private healthcare which is known for rampant exploitation and scarce availability because we have to ensure that social impact and our sustainability goes hand-in-hand.
Our baby steps towards helping mothers and babies began by working through partner healthcare organisations like hospitals, government bodies, and NGOs. At every step of the way we were careful not to let the technology aspect overpower the core philosophy: Understand what our mothers and babies need and make it accessible to them. Instead of copying our competition or being overwhelmed by our own technological prowess, we collaboratively worked towards building tailored solutions. After a few years of walking on this road, we have numbers to speak for themselves. CareMother has helped to triple the maternal healthcare coverage, halve operational costs, and bring down mortality to almost 50% of previous value. These numbers are obtained from 77 partner healthcare organisations from 11 states which have been able to provide healthcare service to 43000+ mothers till today.
As we waded through these murky waters, the picture became clear that bridging access gap is only a small part of the entire spectrum. To have a wide and long-lasting impact, we had to think in terms of quality, affordability, accessibility, and personalised healthcare delivery. Even understanding the social angle became necessary for us as by empowering the women in the family and making her in-charge of decisions regarding her own health proved to be vital for us. This understanding also corroborates with the most common behavior trends observed by numerous market research agencies as below.
- 80% of household healthcare spending is done by women
- Working-age females spend 29% more per capita on healthcare compared to males
- Women are 75% more likely to use digital tools for healthcare than men
Source: https://hitconsultant.net/2020/02/12/analysis-digital-health-investors-femtech/#.XwRxUZMza3I
These insights have helped us define a motto with 3-Es to embark on.
- Enable women with knowledge for wellness and care for themselves
- Ensure women with access of quality healthcare
- Empower women to make decisions about their own health
It was but obvious that CareMother alone wouldn’t be able to do everything that is needed to sail alongside these 3-Es. Thus, a platform strategy is adapted in which the collaboration with other ecosystem players to jointly enable access to quality women care & wellness services is possible. As a facilitator, CareMother’s real challenge in the future is to tightly align the core philosophy (Enable, Ensure, Empower) with the business goals of ecosystem players in such a way that anything that doesn’t obey this conjecture gets thrown out.
We believe in testing and experimenting whether it’s products or our philosophy. In the quest to expand our vision to build upon our past work and acquire a larger dimension, we tested out our hypothesis by directly engaging with the real world. Our platform-first approach now has changed our growth model in a way that we can see hope for immediate scalability. The value offered by a larger platform with some free services to our already built network of healthcare organisations, doctors and caretakers is coming to fruition leading to an organic growth. We believe that the skeletal aspect of our vision is ready, and the blood and flesh will be created over it in coming time.
