The Aga Khan University, Karachi, launched Umeed-e-Nau in 2016, a project aimed at improving maternal, child, and adolescent health in Pakistan. Umeed-e-Nau (meaning ‘new hope’ in Urdu), is a five-year research project, funded by a USD $25m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The research aims to assess the various approaches, insights, and evidence around maternal, child and adolescent health care.

Under the leadership of Dr Zulfiqar Bhutta, Director of the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at AKU, the project will assist public-private partnerships (PPP) to deliver interventions with an aim of improving the quality of health care in 14 health facilities among the rural districts of Balochistan, Southern Punjab, and Sindh provinces of Pakistan.

AKDN dHRC has collaborated with AKU to develop innovative digital health solutions for the project, including a mobile application and a Learning Management System (LMS). The Umeed-e-Nau application digitises the data compilation and health facility reporting process to improve information management.

At the 14 rural health facilities, physicians manually develop paper-based records for reporting to the District Headquarter hospitals. The AKU team visits each location and captures a photograph of the paper reports via the app. Through defined, intelligent algorithms, each entry is counted and reports are generated automatically. The reports and other data are synchronised with the central server and accessible via the Umeed-e-Nau web portal.

The Umeed-e-Nau LMS is a capacity building, web-based application, which ensures the availability of teaching modules and other course content used by the physicians at AKU, during the sessions conducted at rural health facilities. The LMS enables physicians to access uploaded content prior to in-class sessions in order to better prepare.