Health min opens spl centre for tracking of mother, child care

Health Ministry today launched a 'Mother and Child Tracking Facilitation Centre' to ensure ante and post-natal care for pregnant women along with immunisation services for children.
The tracking system will help in the collection of "very valuable data" from states on health schemes and programmes and enable betterment of such facilities through evaluation, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said at the launch.
The facility will be used for sending of health promotion messages in voice and text format to beneficiaries according to the month of their pregnancy or age of the child, a release said here.
It will also be used to tranfer cash benefits directly to the bank accounts of pregnant women and mothers and also to Accredited Social Health Activists.

The Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) was launched under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in December, 2009, but so far had only a call centre operating as part of it.
"The facilitation centre shall be able to reach out to a much larger number of pregnant women and mothers through bigger infrastructure," Azad said.

MCTS is a name-based web service that gathers details of pregnant women and children of up to five years of age and tracks delivery of services due to them. Over 10.5 crore pregnant women and children have till date been registered under MCTS.
Regular SMSs are sent to pregnant women and parents of children to make them aware of the services due. More than 71 lakh SMSs have been sent to beneficiaries in January, 2014, alone, he said.

Cellphone numbers of over 8.92 crore beneficiaries have been noted so far. The Centre is expected to make 7 lakh calls every month.