UCT recently hosted an event, “Digital Health in South Africa: The case of MomConnect past, present and future”.

MomConnect  is a South African National Department of Health initiative which aims to support maternal health through the use of cell phone based technologies integrated into maternal and child health services.

MomConnect was established by the National Department of Health in 2014 to register pregnancies and provide pregnant and postpartum women with twice-weekly health information text messages as well as access to a helpdesk for queries and feedback. Since its inception, MomConnect has grown to become one of the largest mHealth initiatives globally; by December 2017, they had cumulatively registered over 1.7 million pregnant women in over 95% (3300) of public health facilities nationally to receive short messaging service health information messages.  They had also received more than 14 000 spontaneously reported compliments to the helpdesk—almost ten times more than the complaints received.

The services are free to the user, and messages are available in all our 11 official languages. MomConnect is voluntary and pregnant women can opt out at any time.

A representative of the project explained that the overall objectives of the initiative are:
•To introduce a mechanism for registering electronically all pregnancies in the public health system as early as possible,
•To send targeted health promotion messages to pregnant women to improve their health and that of their infants,
•To provide pregnant women with an interactive mechanism to feedback on the service they have received.

With the continued support from the National Department of Health, UCT will continue to host seminars and online webinars supporting the launch of a special journal supplement published in BMJ Global Health (http://gh.bmj.com/content/3/Suppl_2) on MomConnect.

For more information about MomConnect please visit the website: https://bit.ly/2NkDsqM