2015 Asia-Pacific Gold Winner – Ooredoo Myanmar
Company: Ooredoo Myanmar
Category: New Products & Services: Telecommunications - Service
Entry Title: ‘maymay’ is Myanmar’s first maternal healthcare mobile application
Features and Functions
Ooredoo, a leading international telecommunications company recently launched a maternal healthcare application in its newest market – Myanmar. The app bridges the mobile and health sectors to help ensure that a wealth of useful maternal, child health and wellness information is readily available to women across the country both during and after pregnancy.
Introduced to the market in the fourth quarter of 2014, ‘maymay’ is Myanmar’s first maternal healthcare mobile application. ‘maymay’, which means ‘mother’ in the local language, targets Burmese women, with a particular focus on pregnant women as well as their partners, families and communities.
The service has three main features:
• Maternal health advice notifications: Users of the app receive 3 maternal health advice alerts per week, tailored to the stage of the user’s pregnancy. The user receives the first section of the advice message as a push notification and is then encouraged to click on the notification to open the app and read the rest of the message.
• Doctor locator service: The app uses the user’s GPS location and a database of Burmese healthcare professionals to provide users with information on, and the location of, their nearest healthcare worker through Google Maps. Users can select pins to view information on the healthcare worker’s location, specialty and contact details.
• User profile: Users of the app are required to enter details of their last menstrual period or expected due date in order for the notifications to be timed with the stage of their pregnancy. Messages are also adapted for whether or not it is the user’s first pregnancy, and the user can switch notifications on and off at any time.
Additionally, the service is user-friendly, requiring only a simple registration process and offering local content available to users in the Burmese language.
Benefits
Myanmar currently faces a number of issues related to maternal health, among which include a high infant and maternal mortality rate and significant levels of baby malnutrition. With over 70% of births occurring without any professional medical service, information about maternal and child health is scarce among young parents, pregnant women and their families. For many, the primary source of maternal health information is friends and family, leading to numerous, and sometimes dangerous, myths around pregnancy and childbirth.
Where online access was available Ooredoo discovered that a lack of content in the local language meant that people were using facebook to search for health-related information in their native language.
The maymay app combats these problems by providing a wealth of high quality information in the Myanmar language. To ensure that this information is credible the advice is obtained from the Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) and approved by Myanmar's Ministry of Health prior to dissemination, and kept relevant through the localization and translation of texts by PSI's Myanmar doctors.
Results
Despite mobile subscriber penetration in Myanmar estimated at a mere 25% of the population, Ooredoo’s maymay app has received over 10,000 downloads and 40,000 Facebook followers as of January 2015. It aims to reach over 30,000 downloads by February 2016.
Other projects currently in the works include educational outreach programmes to improve the technical literacy of women, the expansion of maymay to support additional ethnic languages, and the launch of ‘paypay’ (Father), a similar messaging system that has been contextualized for the husband. These, coupled with Ooredoo’s ongoing network expansion within the country, work to build a strong foundation for extensive usage of ‘maymay’ in future.
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