Maternal Concept Lab

MCL is a cross-cutting project working to improve the delivery of maternal, newborn and child health services using technology by collaboratively making eHealth tools more reusable, evidence-based, and effective.

MCL is a direct response to dramatically growing interest and resources surrounding eHealth and maternal health in advance of the 2015 deadline for MDGs 4 and 5. There's a short list of platforms being used or considered by most projects in this space (e.g. OpenMRS, JavaRosa, DHIS, etc.) and significant overlap in requirements providing a unique opportunity to unify efforts. Reduced duplication means more expertise and resources spent on improving outcomes and innovation rather than reinventing the wheel. Participating organizations include Partners in Health, Dimagi, D-tree International, MoTeCH, Columbia University, ITIDO in Tanzania, Millennium Villages Project, Sustainable Sciences Institute, and more.

Our approach is to prioritize high-value goals that the community is unlikely to achieve on its own in the near term. We've broken these efforts up into 3 categories:

1. Establish the MCL:Core, a common language to communicate maternal health information
2. Build out the MCL:Platform to make the dictionary easy to use, low-cost to adopt, and transparent. Components of the platform include MCL:Search, MCL:Mapper, MCL:Repository, and MCL:Lab.
3. Populate the MCL:Repository with MCL-enabled reports, protocols, forms, and other tools that are ready for use by other oganizations.