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PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Glob. Womens Health
Sec. Maternal Health
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fgwh.2025.1469328
Leveraging health financing, digital health and self-care approaches to strengthen maternal health journeys in India: Perspectives from Assam
Provisionally accepted
Sowmya Ramesh† 1 Charlotte E Warren† * 2* Benjamin Bellows 3 Himanshi Dwivedi 1 Himani Gupta 1 Ashita Munjral 4 Swapnil Rawat 5 David Tresner-Kirsch 3 Jitender Nagpal 6- 1 Population Council Institute, New Dehli, India
- 2 Population Council, New York, United States
- 3 Nivi Inc, Washington, United States
- 4 Population Council, New Dehli, India
- 5 Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research, New Delhi, India
- 6 Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research, New Dehli, India
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Maternal morbidity and mortality in India continue to be high in populations and places with limited access to quality health services. Major barriers include out of pocket expenditure, lack of autonomy and information around maternal health services and weak implementation of pro-poor policies. Addressing demand-side barriers and enablers is critical to improving healthcare uptake and healthcare adherence along the pregnancy-postnatal continuum. This paper describes three well known operational spaces, maternal health financing, digital health, and self-care interventions within the Indian context including pro-poor maternal health policies, mobile health ecosystems and networks, and self-care opportunities that promote women’s knowledge, choice, self-efficacy, and autonomy. These are expanded on to identify additional opportunities to improve access to MH services. Finally, the authors describe a new digital health intervention using a chat-based digital support system that has the potential to reduce barriers that women face in seeking and receiving quality MH services in Assam and elsewhere. Future work on how to implement such a combined approach need to account for multiple contextual factors, including understanding the nature and success of national pro-poor MH policies in each state, how the public and private health systems function and interact, social determinants of health as well as engaging women in the process to improve maternal and newborn health outcomes
Keywords: Maternal health, Health finance, Chatbot, digital support system, empowerment, Selfcare, Assam, India
Received: 23 Jul 2024; Accepted: 18 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ramesh†, Warren† *, Bellows, Dwivedi, Gupta, Munjral, Rawat, Tresner-Kirsch and Nagpal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Charlotte E Warren† *, Population Council, New York, United States
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