Philips’ software is part of these virtual healthcare services – connecting thehealthcare provider using an app built to provide them with information about, forexample, obstetric care. Suppose the assessed mother’s condition raises questions orposes any risks, the local health care provider is able to virtually connect the pregnantwoman in the primary care facility with a remote midwife or trained gynaecologist.

Virtual care is a pragmatic solution to ensure access to specialized physicians forpatients in remote areas via local assessment and referral. The digitization ofhealthcare is a breakthrough in improving access to care around the world. Collecteddata will help develop better solutions for community health workers and elevateprimary health care in some of the world’s most remote areas.

In several projects, Philips Foundation explored models to increase access to obstetric ultrasound through task-sharing between locally operating midwives supported by sonographers-at-a-distance via telehealth.

Midwives in Kenya are being trained, for instance, at Amref International University; however, they often leave their jobs as they cannot make a living being a midwife. To utilize this lost capacity, in a project with Amref, we focused on testing a social franchise model in which midwives would offer pregnancy screening in primary healthcare facilities using ultrasound to providing them with an income (through pay per scan).

The project results confirmed pregnant women’s willingness to pay for the service, validating the principal foundation for an income-based scalable model. Whether the time to break even is sufficiently short to enable, the midwife-based ownership model will strongly depend on the number of screenings. The project led to valuable new insights, such as identifying women’s motivations and barriers to taking up routine ultrasound screening and the willingness to pay for it, which may result in a self-sustaining model that offers a viable income for midwives.

The project was built around mobile health applications, targeting four audiences: community members, frontline health workers, medical officers, and staff nurses. The intervention included the ChARM device, a Philips-developed technology for pneumonia identification through automated respiratory rate measurement.

After almost two years, strong improvement has been observed in community awareness and care-seeking behavior, as well as improved case management. The mHealth tools for pneumonia were developed to stimulate behavioral change and support frontline healthworkers.

The tools have not only helped the primary health care workers to do their job and actively prevent childhood pneumonia, but it has also been able to distinguish and strengthen their role in the community. This boosted the confidence of health workers and made them more reliable in supporting families and patients in the community.