Makueni County is one of the first devolved units to leverage Generative AI to address delays in care seeking, particularly by mothers.
The initiative follows the completion of a six-month Google.org fellowship by Jacaranda Health, a nonprofit, aimed at transforming the potential of Generative AI to support underserved mothers and babies in Kenya.
Jacaranda Health partners with governments to deploy affordable and scalable solutions through government hospitals to sustainably improve the quality of care and maternal and newborn outcomes.
Between April and September, the company’s Nairobi-based team was taken through extensive training by seven Google.org technical experts m to improve the personalization and scale potential of Jacaranda’s digital health service, PROMPTS.
PROMPTS is an AI-enabled digital health service that improves care-seeking behaviour by empowering women to seek care at the right time and place with the deserved urgency.
The platform works by sending mothers SMSs tracked to their stage of pregnancy, alongside an AI-enabled helpdesk service that triages and responds to their questions and sparks a rapid referral chain if a risk is identified.
PROMPTS has been rolled out at the Makueni Child $ Mother Hospital, a development Governor Mutula Kilonzo Jnr welcomed as one that would go a long way in cutting postpartum hemorrhage cases in the county.
“Our county has a wide coverage of 8,300km2 and we have significantly high mobile phone penetration. Our strength lies in leveraging this mobile technology to tackle these maternal health issues, and I fully support the adoption of AI to help us advance our healthcare support,” Kilonzo said.
He spoke when the Google and Jacaranda Health teams visited Makueni County health facilities, including the Makueni County Hospital to see how PROMPTS is empowering new and expectant mothers.
Jacaranda Health is a Kenya-based non-profit that works to improve maternal and newborn health (MNH) care in public government facilities where the majority of underserved women deliver their babies.
In Kenya, it partners with the Ministry of Health and 20 county governments to deploy affordable, scalable, and tech-enabled solutions across over 1,100 hospitals and health centres.
It said the collaboration with Google.org has helped to transform the personalisation of how PROMPTS AI interacts with mothers at scale - including personalising responses around a user’s unique clinical and demographic profile and enhancing the accuracy of Jacaranda’s Swahili-speaking model to rapidly respond to mothers at scale.
“Jacaranda will be rolling out these personalisation features on PROMPTS over the coming months,” Communications Manager Joan Masinde said in a statement.
