Original title: Development and implementation of “Mazboot Bunyad”: a digital health intervention for the screening and management of undernutrition among children aged 6–59 months, at private provider clinics in urban slums of Karachi, Pakistan
Mazboot Bunyad is a phone-and-dashboard system for tracking children’s nutrition at private clinics in Karachi. Each child gets a record linked by a QR code, and staff measure the child’s upper arm to help classify nutrition status. The app can prompt follow-up, while supervisors use the dashboard to track missed visits, supplies, and recovery. In its early rollout, teams enrolled 8,406 children, but supply gaps remained a challenge.
Imagine keeping track of children who visit a busy community clinic. Paper notes can be hard to update, and a missed visit may go unnoticed. In this paper, each child’s QR-linked record is like a shared file, while the phone tool helps staff record an arm measurement and supervisors check who needs follow-up or supplies.
Families often seek care from private clinics, but those clinics have been left out of nutrition programmes in Pakistan. A shared digital record can help clinic and supervisory teams spot children needing care, follow up, and monitor supplies.
The abstract reports an early implementation and a retrospective review of routine programme data from July to December 2024. It does not establish whether the system improved children’s health outcomes or how well it would work at a larger scale. The authors note that supply-chain gaps could affect implementation.
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Development and implementation of “Mazboot Bunyad”: a digital health intervention for the screening and management of undernutrition among children aged 6–59 months, at private provider clinics in urban slums of Karachi, Pakistan — Shifa Salman Habib, Ammarah Ali, Muhammad Fazal Hussain Qureshi et al. — BMC Digital Health — doi:10.1186/s44247-026-00303-7
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.