Dimagi expands CommCare to 40 new programs in India over the next two years

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

With generous funding from the USAID DIV, Dimagi will expand CommCare, a mobile platform, to 40 new programs in health and other social sectors throughout India over the next two years.

New Delhi, India, October 1, 2012 — United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Development Innovation Ventures fund (DIV) program has awarded Dimagi a Stage 2 award to scale its award winning CommCare platform across India to strengthen community health worker programs and improve community health care and service delivery to millions. Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Counselor at USAID, announced the award: “Dimagi’s explosive arrival on the m-health scene is an early sign of the results that we can achieve with investments in mobile-based platforms for healthcare. I am proud to recognize Dimagi’s enormous accomplishments with a second award from USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures, to fuel its continued rise to success.”

Since 2005, India’s National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) has trained and deployed more than 750,000 Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) – NRHM’s naming of community health care workers (CHWs) – to provide life saving interventions for their communities. Despite largely achieving its goal of enlisting “one ASHA for every village,” the ASHA program still needs innovations to overcome persistent challenges related to training, motivating, supervising, and monitoring ASHAs. Dimagi, a health and technology social enterprise, aims to unlock the tremendous potential of the ASHA program and other social sector frontline worker programs to address these persistent challenges with CommCare, its innovative mobile phone-based software platform.

In 2010, Dimagi received DIV Stage 1 funding from USAID for CommCare and rapidly engaged 11 organizations using a proof-of-concept deployment model. Eight of these projects are already scaling. “Building off of this success, this Stage 2 funding will allow us to develop the evidence base, increase our field team, and build needed core functionality to reach scale with our partners in India” said Dimagi’s CEO, Jonathan Jackson. “We’re excited to receive the Stage 2 funding and hope it will be as catalytic and successful as our Stage 1 award.”

The project plans to engage more than 40 organizations through the same rapid proof-of-concept deployment model. Dimagi will provide each new organization adopting CommCare with 10 free phones and free technical support to facilitate the pilot phase. CommCare is an innovative, cost-effective, scalable open source mobile platform for CHWs and frontline workers that seeks to boost workers’ abilities through improved access, quality, experience and accountability to care. CommCare comprises a mobile phone app and web interface made available to remote health facilities, including non-governmental organizations, public health organizations, research institutions and governments. This allows resource-challenged health programs to store and access patient information and perform case management for at-risk patients. CommCare contains checklists and educational prompts to help health workers promote healthy behaviors that have been shown to reduce mortality and disease in low-income populations.

“By combining a field-tested mHealth solution, massive health workforce, broad base of implementation partners, and rigorous and timely research, we believe the support of USAID DIV provides a unique opportunity to realize the full potential of community-based primary care envisioned by the Government of India,” said Jackson.

Dimagi has launched a new RFA and is currently accepting proof of concept applications from organizations in India to rapidly launch CommCare to support frontline workers: www.commcarehq.org/div2/round1/

About Dimagi, Inc.

Dimagi is an award-winning, socially conscious mobile health technology company that helps organizations deliver quality health care to urban and rural communities. Dimagi’s core open source platform CommCare has been developed through rigorous field work by its engineers, physicians and public health professionals. Dimagi has worked in 25 countries with partners including WHO, World Bank, USAID, CDC, WorldVision, Unicef, PATH, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Acumen Fund. Dimagi currently operates offices in Boston, MA USA, New Delhi, India,  Cape Town, South Africa, and Maputo, Mozambique.

  |  http://www.commcarehq.org |  https://twitter.com/dimagi  |  https://www.facebook.com/dimagi.inc

(Press Contacts: Carter Powers, COO, Dimagi Inc., +1.617.649.2214, cpowers@dimagi.com)