Revolutionizing Maternal Healthcare with AI

Revolutionizing Maternal Healthcare with AI

Published on January 30, 2025

In Kenya, accessing timely and quality maternal healthcare has long been a challenge for millions of women. Jacaranda Health, a nonprofit organization, is transforming the maternal healthcare landscape through innovative digital solutions. Among its pioneering initiatives is PROMPTS, a digital health tool powered by AI, which has empowered nearly three million Kenyan mothers with life-saving information via SMS.

Empowering Mothers Through AI-Driven Care

Since its inception in 2017, PROMPTS has evolved from a simple SMS-based information service to a sophisticated AI-powered platform. Initially, PROMPTS sent reminders to expectant mothers about essential health checkups and risk factors during pregnancy. However, when mothers started responding with questions, Jacaranda Health saw an opportunity to enhance engagement and provide more personalized support. Today, PROMPTS integrates an advanced Swahili-speaking large language model (LLM) that tailors information based on user profiles and rapidly triages high-risk cases to human help desk agents.

By leveraging AI, PROMPTS has significantly improved its response speed and accuracy, ensuring that expectant and new mothers receive timely, relevant, and actionable health information. The AI component categorizes and prioritizes messages, allowing help desk agents to quickly identify urgent cases and direct mothers to appropriate care facilities.

A Holistic Approach to Maternal and Newborn Health

Jacaranda Health takes a multi-pronged approach to maternal and newborn care by addressing key stakeholders in the healthcare system:

  • MENTORS: A training-of-trainers program that equips frontline obstetric workers with skills to manage pregnancy and postpartum complications. The program includes DELTA, a WhatsApp-based remote learning tool with self-paced modules and assessments.
  • PULSE: A data visualization and analysis platform that provides healthcare managers and government officials with real-time feedback on service delivery. Insights from PULSE help identify gaps in care and direct resources to areas of greatest need.
  • PROMPTS: A two-way SMS tool that encourages health-seeking behaviors and provides crucial maternal health information. The integration of AI has further enhanced its efficiency and impact.

Tangible Impact on Healthcare Outcomes

The implementation of Jacaranda Health’s solutions has yielded impressive results:

  • 87% of MENTORS program participants reported improved competence in standard obstetric care.
  • Over 20 Kenyan county governments use PULSE dashboards for data-driven decision-making.
  • PROMPTS has engaged nearly 2.9 million women across Kenya and is expanding into Ghana and Eswatini through government partnerships.
  • 90% of high-risk cases flagged by PROMPTS receive timely hospital care.

AI-Powered Enhancements to PROMPTS

Before integrating AI, PROMPTS help desk agents manually categorized and responded to thousands of messages daily. As the platform scaled, AI became essential in ensuring swift and accurate responses. Today, AI models trained on historical messages help classify inquiries into over 30 categories, from general pregnancy concerns to specific nutrition queries. This refined system allows urgent cases—such as signs of pregnancy complications—to be flagged immediately, ensuring that at-risk mothers receive prompt medical attention.

Jay Patel, Jacaranda Health’s Head of Technology, highlights the impact of AI:

“When I joined, we were handling 100 questions a day. Now, we receive up to 10,000 questions daily. AI helps us identify urgent cases faster, ensuring mothers in distress get immediate help.”

Embedding Responsible AI Practices

Jacaranda Health upholds rigorous ethical standards in its AI development. The organization adheres to its Principles for Responsible, Person-Centered AI, ensuring safe and equitable AI usage. These principles include:

  • First, do no harm: Prioritizing maternal and newborn health in all AI-driven interventions.
  • Respect user data: Collecting minimal personally identifiable information and maintaining strict data security.
  • Design for equity and local context: Fine-tuning AI models to support Swahili and other underserved languages, ensuring accessibility for marginalized communities.
  • Keep humans in the loop: AI augments, rather than replaces, human help desk agents, maintaining expert oversight in maternal healthcare support.
  • Open-source collaboration: Leveraging and sharing AI advancements through platforms like Hugging Face to benefit the broader digital health community.
  • Sustainability: Adopting cost-effective AI solutions that maximize impact while minimizing resource constraints.

The Future of AI-Enabled Maternal Healthcare

Looking ahead, Jacaranda Health aims to:

  • Expand PROMPTS across sub-Saharan Africa, introducing the tool in more languages.
  • Enhance AI capabilities to provide more targeted support for at-risk mothers.
  • Broaden PROMPTS’ scope beyond maternal and newborn health to address other pressing healthcare needs for mothers.

With its AI-driven approach, Jacaranda Health is not just improving maternal healthcare—it is revolutionizing it. By harnessing technology, data, and community collaboration, the organization continues to create a future where every mother receives the care she needs at the right time and place.