On this Mother’s Day, Dhana Laxmi, who is eight-months pregnant, was deciding where to have her baby as she walked through the bright pink waiting room filled with laughing women, sharing stories and advice about child birth at the LifeSpring Hospital in Andhra Pradesh, India.

In celebration of Mother’s Day, LifeSpring, a growing chain of low-cost maternity hospitals, held a health camp for pregnant women. The doctors provided free antenatal care check-ups, along with iron and calcium tablets, and the hospital administrators gave the pregnant women, their husbands, and mothers (who are often the primary decision-maker) tours of the hospital, speaking of the benefits of institutional delivery to women still making up their minds.

Dhana Laxmi was typical of LifeSpring customers. She delivered her first baby at her mother’s house in the village. She  has a grade 10 education and works with her husband selling fruits at a road stand.

Traditionally, women desiring institutional delivery had to decide between a free but low-resourced government hospital, or a private hospital that was only affordable through selling assets or borrowing money. LifeSpring offers maternity services at one-half to one-third of market rates for private hospitals.  A joint venture between Acumen Fund and HLL Lifecare Limited, LifeSpring’s mission is to provide high quality, low cost core maternity health care services to low-income women in India.  A normal delivery (including 2-day stay and all medicine charges) costs 4000 rupees, or about US $80.

While not profit-maximizing, LifeSpring focuses on sustainability as the route to achieving scalable social impact. Last month, LifeSpring CEO Anant Kumar described model at the World Healthcare Congress in Washington, D.C.  Speaking on a panel called “Innovations in Health Care Delivery,” Mr. Kumar highlighted LifeSpring’s focus on social impact, sustainability, and scalability.

Several other innovations in the area of maternal healthcare were featured at this year’s World Healthcare Congress. One of the most promising and exciting of these was MobiSante, a low-cost, smartphone-based ultrasound scanner.  The entire unit is the size of a microphone and iPhone.  Headed by Sailesh Chutani (CEO) and David M. Zar (CTO), MobiSante is currently undergoing FDA approval for usage in the U.S.

Another featured innovation was Next-Gen Phototherapy developed by a joint MIT/RISD product design and development course team, in conjunction with Cambridge-based Design that Matters.  The new product treats infants suffering from jaundice in the developing world.

This Mother’s Day, it’s exciting to reflect on the many promising innovations in the field of maternal and neonatal health worldwide.  So often, we hear so much about what’s wrong – that’s it’s good to take a step back and reflect on what’s right.

If you can’t get enough, Maternova is a great website for innovations in maternal and neonatal health.

Photo by John Tucker.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Mother’s Day at LifeSpring Hospital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.