Jacaranda Health: PROMPTS — Promoting Mothers During Pregnancy & Postpartum Through SMS

Creating a world where all mothers experience childbirth safely and with respect, and all newborns get a safe start in life!

Mothers should not lose their lives during childbirth. While considerable strides are being made globally to prevent or lower maternal death, in Kenya, published data indicates that more than 6,000 maternal deaths and 35,000 stillbirths still occur each year.

Up to 33% of all maternal deaths in Kenya are caused by delays in care-seeking. Low care seeking behaviour stems from a number of factors including a lack of access to life-saving information to know when to seek care and where to go.

Jacaranda Health is a Kenyan-based non-profit that works with governments to deploy affordable and highly scalable health solutions via government hospitals — ensuring mothers experience childbirth safely and with respect and that all newborns get a safe start in life. They work with the Kenyan Ministry of Health and 20 Kenyan county Governments, with solutions deployed across over 1,100 hospitals and health centres. This rapid growth in Kenya has sparked interest from partners in new geographies, and Jacaranda is now working to design and deploy context-relevant solutions with local stakeholders and government health managers in other countries across Africa.

They have developed a package of innovative, affordable solutions that address two leading drivers of poor maternal and neonatal health (MNH) outcomes in Kenya; delays in seeking care and gaps in the quality of intrapartum care that mothers receive at facilities.

PROMPTS: Helping mothers across Kenya safely navigate their pregnancies

Jacaranda Health’s digital platform, PROMPTS (PROmoting Mothers during Pregnancy/Postpartum Through SMS) connects mothers with this much needed life saving advice and referral to care, and supports them to navigate their pregnancy journeys with increased confidence. The platform improves care-seeking behavior by sending mums rigorously-tested “nudge” SMS messages tracked to their stage of pregnancy, alongside a two-way helpdesk service which — through machine learning — triages and responds to thousands of messages from mums each day in English or Swahili.

This service is completely free to the user, and Jacaranda maintains low operating costs by employing AI-based triage tools that answer up to 4,000 questions from mothers daily, and flag questions in real time that might indicate a risk to the clinical helpdesk, meaning agents can respond and refer to mothers who may be at risk in a low-cost, rapid way.

The feedback from mothers has been amazing, as can be experienced from the customer stories shared in the video below.

Since its inception, Jacaranda’s AI-enabled platform has reached over 1 million women across Kenya, with health providers enrolling mums to the platform in 1,000+ health facilities in partnership with local governments. It has also had a proven impact on health seeking behaviour, driving a 20% increase in women seeking prenatal care at government hospitals, doubling uptake of family planning, and ensuring that 85% of women referred for care go to hospital.

Working with Africa’s Talking

Jacaranda Health first heard about AT through their deployment of RapidPro, a free, open source platform used to power mobile-based messaging services and data collection. They wanted an easy way to connect to Safaricom, Kenya’s largest local telco, to send bulk SMSes through PROMPTS to mothers.

They quickly identified AT as the biggest and most reliable SMS gateway tool, with an in-built connector to RapidPro.

Jacaranda Health relies on AT’s SMS channel product to serve as an intermediary and seamless interface between Safaricom and PROMPTS, specifically RapidPro, which allows them to schedule a sequence of carefully-designed messages to improve health seeking behavior amongst mothers across Kenya.

Jacaranda Health have loved working with AT and have termed the services as ‘fantastic’, with the team at AT always ready to respond to their questions.

As partners, Jacaranda Health have also enjoyed considerable discounts over and above the standard rates due to the increasingly high volume of SMS messages they send to mothers each month.

Growth Plans for Jacaranda Health

Jacaranda Health is working towards making PROMPTS a national digital health solution in Kenya. They are expanding its technology infrastructure and functionality to ensure that they are capable of providing the same quality service to mothers — at scale.

Jacaranda Health has set its focus for PROMPTS on reducing unit costs (currently at $0.74 a mother) as demand increases while maintaining the quality of solution delivery and impact.

Sustaining program scale-up across the country will require their solutions to be integrated into government hospitals and health systems as the standard of care, and continued efforts towards transitioning the solutions for full ownership by county governments.

As the uptake and impact of PROMPTS rapidly grows in Kenya, they see exciting opportunities to replicate the platform to improve health outcomes for more mums and babies across Africa.

Jacaranda is working with the national Ministry of Health, Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI) and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) in Eswatini to launch PROMPTS in-country, to drive health seeking behaviour amongst women and help reach the last mile of under-immunized infants across the country.

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