New Features and Content Bolster Nivi’s Digital Health Marketplace
Partnering with Ipas to Improve Contraceptive Access After Abortion
Over the past few months, Nivi has been hard at work with Ipas Kenya to improve post-abortion contraceptive access via Nivi referral to frontline pharmacies and primary clinics and we’re proud to announce that our collaborative program launched January 9th, 2023!
It’s a partnership that makes sense—Ipas is dedicated to building health system capacity to serve people who want contraception, and Nivi integrates its digital health chat experience, askNivi, with many partners to rapidly accelerate individual engagement and referral into the health system. Effectively leveraging Nivi’s technology, expertise, and insights, Ipas can do much more to advance its project objectives and impact.
Pharmacies are an essential part of facilitating universal health coverage (UHC), and in underserved or rural settings, pharmacies can do more to improve access to reproductive health products and services. However, pharmacists are ultimately limited to what they can provide during that in-person interaction— follow up and post-service health education and guidance is difficult. Nivi is uniquely positioned to help pharmacists reach patients both before and after products have been delivered; moreover, it can help those pharmacies grow their business, scale up, and sustain partnerships with local providers once a project is complete. Nivi is uniquely positioned to help to grow small businesses, like pharmacies, and sustain partnership with local providers once a project is complete.
While it’s absolutely true that health education and social behavior change campaigns can deepen the public’s understanding of a given health product or service, there often remains significant challenges with attribution and conversion between understanding and action. Nivi uses its software to employ a health marketplace model, which improves access between caregivers and patients, sellers and customers—strengthening health system integration, scaling their reach, and facilitating points of care to increase accessibility to consumers.
In partnership with Ipas, under its Post Medication Abortion Contraceptive (PMAC) research project, Nivi is expanding its marketplace model to 36 pharmacies in Kenya and strengthening our support of post-abortion contraceptive journeys. Specifically, post-abortion contraception information is now available via askNivi’s Main Menu. Secondly, at pharmacies participating in PMAC, askNivi posters and business cards with QR codes scannable via WhatsApp have been strategically placed , introducing curious customers directly to Nivi for the same information and guidance. Third, Nivi conducts ongoing experiments involving everything from on-the-ground visuals to online advertisements and internal chatbot content to employ behavior change theory (e.g., strengthening motivation to act) to identify best practices to increase access to contraceptive uptake for women in a post-abortion journey. Best practices such as…
Placement: QR codes must be unobstructed and easily seen and accessed
Reassurance: inform clients that askNivi is 100% confidential
Encouragement: give an overview of askNivi’s value and encourage clients to scan
Assistance: help clients start a private conversation using the keyword
We look forward to providing some results of our ventures with Ipas, soon!
Conditional Branching: a New, Essential Function
In 2022, Nivi launched a new feature on its chatbot platform, askNivi, that gives our users more flexibility and choice: conditional branching.
Conditional branching is a functional ability to navigate from one message to another—or from one entire section of content to another—based on a prior response of the user. Here are a few of the characteristics the feature can identify and process:
Gender
Age
Geographic location
Language
Question responses
Take special note of that final bullet point—because it means, essentially, that the askNivi chatbot can segment users into incredibly specific content, based on infinite yet specific conditions such as the user’s marital status or parental status, the age of their child or children, whether or not they received a certain vaccine, a particular feature of their health history, or how interested they are in a given health category or service. It’s a unique feature we have yet to see elsewhere, making the askNivi platform more dynamic, flexible, and agile than ever.
Moreover, conditional branching allows the chatbot to guide users to the right place in the digital health marketplace based on their needs and their intent. And what could be more important in healthcare other than accuracy? For any virtual marketplace, clinical or otherwise, products and services only translate to profit when they are delivered to consumers in search of them. Not only does askNivi accomplish that, it’s engineered to do so with value; helping health providers, promoters, and manufacturers flourish by centering on individuals.
To learn more about what Nivi can do for you, explore below or contact us today!