Creating impact at scale in rural/remote settings: designing, deploying and scaling community based digital innovation - Lessons from Nepal

The Center for Teaching and Research on Innovation (CEPI) of FGV Direito SP holds a workshop within the scope of the research project The personal data protection regime of the General Data Protection Regulation, and the startup market in the healthcare area: legal precautions for the feasibility of business models based on the list of rights of data subjects, which will receive professor and researcher Jay Evans, from the University of Edinburgh.

It has been almost a decade since community based mHealth tools were deployed in rural Nepal. The project began in 2012/13 with 70 community health volunteers using the tools for ANC/PNC coordination. Since then the tools have expanded to cover over half a dozen use cases, all using structured SMS as a driver. It now boasts over 11,000 users and is community run and led, making it one of the largest community funded mHealth systems in Asia. In this presentation  we will examine the nine factors behind the successful roll out of the intervention  along with challenges to continued growth.

Jay Evans is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Interactive Health Ltd (IHL). He has played an important role in the design and development of Well@Being, IHL's new mental health and wellbeing smart app that supports the NHS. Jay has worked internationally  in global health for more than a decade. In tandem with his role at IHL, he is currently a  Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh ,an Associate Researcher at the University of Copenhagen, serves as faculty for the Advanced Programme in Digital Health with ISTCE in Lisbon and supports the NHS Digital Academy as a Teaching Fellow. As part of his global work at IHL and the University of Edinburgh , Jay is Co-I for several RCUK funded studies that seek to democratise  the dissemination of digital health tools and build capacity within government to manage digital health initiatives.