Assess heavy bleeding
where specialists never go.
Margins gives community health workers a structured, equipment-free method to measure and predict heavy menstrual bleeding, built for low-resource settings, offline by design, and trained into existing workflows in under an hour.
Why this gap matters
1 in 5
women of reproductive age experience heavy menstrual bleeding, most never receive a clinical assessment
80%+
of menstrual disorder care in low-income countries is first encountered by community health workers, not specialists
0
validated, offline-ready field tools exist today for CHWs to quantify menstrual blood loss at point of care
How Margins works
Assessment that fits in a field bag.
Structured pictorial scoring, no scales, no lab
Margins uses a validated pictorial blood assessment chart (PBAC) adapted for low-literacy contexts. A CHW walks through a short visual protocol, product saturation, episode frequency, clot presence, to generate a standardized severity score in under five minutes.
Offline-first. Works without a signal bar.
The full assessment runs locally. Patient records, scoring history, and referral flags are stored on-device and sync automatically when a connection becomes available. No data is lost in the field.
Predictive risk flags without a clinician
Margins combines the scored assessment with symptom history to surface referral urgency, anemia risk, treatment threshold exceeded, or watchful waiting, in plain language the CHW can act on immediately.
Fits into what CHWs already do
The protocol is designed to slot into standard household visit workflows and existing community health record systems, no new devices, no retraining budget, no parallel documentation chain.
What's inside
Every tool a CHW needs. Nothing they don't.
Visual Assessment Protocol
Step-by-step pictorial scoring adapted for low-literacy environments. No reading required to complete the assessment.
Severity Score + Referral Flag
Automatic severity classification with plain-language action guidance: refer now, monitor, or manage locally.
Offline-First Data Store
Full functionality without internet. Patient records persist locally and sync when connectivity is restored.
Longitudinal Patient History
Track changes across visits to identify worsening trends before they become emergencies.
Supervisor Dashboard
Aggregate caseload data for program supervisors: caseload heatmaps, referral rates, and outcome tracking across sites.
Anemia Risk Indicator
Symptom-based anemia screening layered into the bleeding assessment, one workflow, two critical data points.
Who Margins is built for
The health worker who sees
what the system misses.
Community health workers, village health volunteers, and frontline maternal health staff who encounter women with heavy bleeding and have no structured way to assess severity, document findings, or know when to refer.
- CHW programs in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America
- NGO-run reproductive health programs operating without clinical staff on-site
- Government health programs building primary care capacity at the community level
- Researchers and implementers piloting menstrual health interventions at scale
“She told me her bleeding was bad. I had nothing to measure it with.”
Community health workers across low-resource settings consistently report the same gap: they can ask about symptoms, but have no standardized way to quantify severity, decide on referral urgency, or document findings in a way a clinic can act on.
Margins replaces
- ✕ Verbal estimation and clinical intuition
- ✕ Paper tally sheets with no scoring logic
- ✕ Referral decisions made with no data
- ✕ Clinic tools that require power and Wi-Fi