By using smartphone data, community health workers in India and Uganda are to be armed with smartphones to save the lives of mothers and their babies.
The $100-million project, supported by the the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the World Bank and others, will be extended to 10 countries in total. These organizations also aim to prevent the premature deaths of six million women and children by 2030.
“The plan is to give front-line health workers inexpensive data analytic tools to help them gather the intelligence they need to focus on communities and families most at risk,” according to Raj Shah, president of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation that is also co-leading the project.
This plan will include creating real-time risk maps through using their smartphone data in order to help health workers more effective at reaching those in need as well as analyzing non-health data in order to predict and prepare in advance for local disease outbreaks or health emergencies.
“A few years ago, these community health workers had no real technology – they were usually flying blind,” Shah said to Reuters.
“Today the vast majority of them have smartphones with data and software technologies literally in their hands – and with those, we can help them do their work better,” Shah added.
Based on the UN figures that were published last week, it showed that while more women and newborns survive now than ever before, then a baby or a pregnant woman still died in an average of every 11 seconds anywhere in the world.
UN figures also showed that the levels of maternal deaths are nearly 50x higher for women in sub-Saharan Africa compared to wealthy countries, and their babies are 10x more likely to die in the first month of their life.
According to UNICEF’s executive director Henrietta Fore, by adopting a precision approach can help health teams “make life-saving decisions and prevent epidemics before they happen“.
“Timely, reliable and disaggregated data, underpinned by a commitment to universal health coverage, can ensure that vulnerable women, children and young people get the care they need at the right place and the right time,” Fore said.
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