Jacaranda Health and IDRC launch new partnership to scale use of responsible AI to assist new and expecting mothers
In low-resourced areas across Kenya, extreme demographic and financial variances can make one pregnancy journey look very different from another. Having localized processes and innovations in place to prevent, predict and respond to these risks in a timely manner can save lives and secure better futures for women, children and entire communities.
Tailoring health information to manage maternal and newborn health risks relies on a broad understanding of its drivers and early intervention to prevent the development of complications. But how do we do this for women who haven’t yet had a check-up? How do we understand how and if social factors increase clinical risk? And, critically, how do we do this at scale?
Maternal health non-profit organization Jacaranda Health, with support from IDRC, is working to answer these questions. Taking place over 24 months, an implementation research project will centre on how artificial intelligence (AI) can proactively screen and support higher-risk mothers who typically have poorer outcomes — from identifying socioeconomic and clinical risk factors in conversational data to connecting high-risk cases to the right care pathways.
The project centres on PROMPTS, Jacaranda’s AI-enabled health navigator that empowers new and expecting mothers via a short message service to seek and connect with the right care in the public health system. Typically, the platform has screened and escalated risk via a single reported danger sign (e.g., a woman messaging about heavy bleeding during pregnancy). But this project will test how AI algorithms can help PROMPTS more equitably identify clinical risk among certain sub-groups of women, as well as identify and respond to other factors that may place a woman at higher clinical risk — like her household income, literacy level, geography or community structure, which are factors known to be associated with adverse health outcomes.
With this project, women will no longer be viewed by PROMPTS only through the clinical aspects of their reproductive journey, but also as individuals with intersecting experiences and identities that can fundamentally alter decisions and care pathways.
Socioeconomic risk can be both a sensitive and subjective issue. This project, which continues to be grounded in communities and connected to decision-makers, will approach these issues using a combination of research approaches and engagement strategies. It will determine which socioeconomic conditions are associated with poor health outcomes and use human-centred design to develop messages that carefully elicit accurate demographic information from users.
Importantly, this data will then be leveraged to explore how best to connect high-risk women to the best support for their condition.
Understanding risk from patient’s perspective
Pregnancy risk is more than just the clinical symptoms, and women’s health needs are larger than their reproductive journey. This holds true especially in low-resourced areas.
Direct-to-client digital health tools like PROMPTS offer a way of understanding risk from the patient perspective at scale, but they have to do so in a way that is sensitive, responsible and equitable to adequately support more vulnerable women.
This project will generate large volumes of client-reported data that will not only help us understand the patterns and nuances of how women interpret and experience risk in these contexts. It will also be the springboard to develop channels of support that are tailored to their needs. Additionally, while commercially available AI models typically lack the customizations or guardrails to effectively and safely engage women in these contexts, this research aims to prove that locally developed models can responsibly and equitably support vulnerable groups.
Ultimately, the hope is that this work will not only reinforce Jacaranda’s commitment to responsible, human-centred and equitable AI, but also influence how AI is used in maternal and newborn health as the global AI landscape rapidly grows and evolves.
Jacaranda Health is a Kenya-based non-profit organization that aims to improve quality of care and outcomes for mothers and babies in the public health system. It partners with local and national governments to deploy a proven package of scalable solutions that support new and expecting mothers, their babies and the nurses that serve them.