Designing for Impact: Strengthening the Noora Health’s Maternal and Neonatal Health Care Companion Program through Systematic Review and Co-creation

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-620-3_8How to use a DOI?

Keywords

maternal and neonatal health; rural healthcare; caregiver education; human-centered design; program scale-up; behavior change

Abstract

Around the world, family caregivers often step in to fill gaps left by overstretched health systems. Patients and their families leave facilities with the implicit responsibility of ensuring recovery, but lack essential guidance. Noora Health’s Care Companion Program (CCP) trains healthcare staff to equip family caregivers with potentially life-saving health skills and then provides mobile chat-based support for both healthcare staff and families. This study addresses the challenge of designing for and delivering high-quality, scalable, and sustainable maternal and neonatal health (MNH) education across the Indian public health system. The objective was to review and redesign the CCP, to better support family caregivers and healthcare workers in driving behavior change across the maternity journey. The research combined a comprehensive review of secondary data, in-depth interviews, design research through rural home and facility visits, and analysis of real-time quantitative monitoring data. Insights from various public health facilities across seven states revealed significant variation in program delivery models, content coverage, tool usage, and caregiver engagement—leading to inconsistent caregiver experiences and changes in health outcomes. The research surfaced actionable themes: defining priority health behaviors, designing adaptable tools for diverse contexts, strengthening caregiver inclusion (especially male caregivers), and improving health system accountability for quality and consistency. The findings informed a participatory futures workshop and ongoing co-creation with stakeholders to evolve the CCP for greater impact at scale. This work highlights how a design-led, system-level approach can enable public health programs to better serve communities while remaining adaptable to local realities.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shirley Du Yan
AU  - Samina Rahman
AU  - Suparna Kalghatgi
AU  - Nupoor Rajkumar
AU  - Ananth Kripesh Srinivasan
AU  - Joya Tamboli
AU  - Baishnabi Monger
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/31
TI  - Designing for Impact: Strengthening the Noora Health’s Maternal and Neonatal Health Care Companion Program through Systematic Review and Co-creation
BT  - Proceedings of the ATLAS International Design Conference 2025 (AIDC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 118
EP  - 132
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-620-3_8
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-620-3_8
ID  - Yan2026
ER  -