Telehealth Care for Mothers and Infants to Improve the Continuum of Care: Protocol for a Quasi-Experimental Study

Abstract

Background Ensuring an appropriate continuum of care in maternal, newborn, and child health, as well as providing nutrition care, is challenging in remote areas. To make care accessible for mothers and infants, we developed a telehealth care system called Portable Health Clinic for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health. Objective Our study will examine the telehealth care system’s effectiveness in improving women’s and infants’ care uptake and detecting their health problems. Methods A quasi-experimental study will be conducted in rural Bangladesh. Villages will be allocated to the intervention and control areas. Pregnant women (≥16 gestational weeks) will participate together with their infants and will be followed up 1 year after delivery or birth. The intervention will include regular health checkups via the Portable Health Clinic telehealth care system, which is equipped with a series of sensors and an information system that can triage participants’ health levels based on the results of their checkups. Women and infants will receive care 4 times during the antenatal period, thrice during the postnatal period, and twice during the motherhood and childhood periods. The outcomes will be participants’ health checkup coverage, gestational and neonatal complication rates, complementary feeding rates, and health-seeking behaviors. We will use a multilevel logistic regression and a generalized estimating equation to evaluate the intervention’s effectiveness. Results Recruitment began in June 2020. As of June 2022, we have consented 295 mothers in the study. Data collection is expected to conclude in June 2024. Conclusions Our new trial will show the effectiveness and extent of using a telehealth care system to ensure an appropriate continuum of care in maternal, newborn, and child health (from the antenatal period to the motherhood and childhood periods) and improve women’s and infants’ health status. Trial Registration ISRCTN Registry ISRCTN44966621; https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN44966621 International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/41586