Recent Developments

“Leave no money on the table”: Financing maternal and child health service delivery

In March, Jacaranda partnered with Kenya’s Council of Governors and the health financing organization Thinkwell to host a workshop for health leadership of six of Kenya’s most populous counties. The two-day workshop was designed to help their government partners get a better understanding of available avenues for financing for health services, and to demonstrate that digital tools like PROMPTS can be low cost, high impact ways of using scarce resources to serve their clients. Ministry of Health (Department of Family Health) representatives joined as well to help guide discussions. Participants shared funding opportunities and untapped resources to solve maternal and child health challenges - such as more effective hospital reimbursement through NHIF’s Linda Mama program. A frequent comment from county leaders was that they had not realized how much money was ‘being left on the table’ due to lack of awareness. Teams left the workshop with a resolve to seek resources more aggressively for the upcoming financial year.

Jacaranda connects PROMPTS mothers to ‘Wheels for Life’ 

Jacaranda Health were excited to announce that they have joined “Wheels for Life”, a multi-partner consortium led by Kenya Healthcare Federation and Amref with Telesky, Bolt, and Rescue.co. ‘Wheels for Life’ provides transportation from home to hospital for pregnancy-related emergencies, and has already connected nearly 2,000 mothers with cabs and ambulances. Jacaranda Health will boost awareness among its 400,000+ PROMPTS users across 10 counties. PROMPTS mothers with pregnancy danger signs in need of emergency transport will be connected to the Wheels for Life helpline for additional triaging and transport in the partner counties where it is available.

Jacaranda Q1 Impact Report is here

The first quarterly report for 2021 focuses on Jacaranda's PROMPTS program, which enrolled over 100,000 mothers last quarter to reach 430,000 mothers to date. They unpack some of the interesting data coming out of the PROMPTS helpdesk - growing questions volumes, increasing numbers of urgent clinical calls, and managing response times at scale. They also profile one of their newest helpdesk team members, Faith Bwana. Meanwhile their mentorship team are now working in over 250 facilities and have trained over 4,100 frontline providers. Read the report here.

As thousands of families continue to trust Penda with their healthcare needs, the first three months of 2021 have been Penda's best ever as they opened their 20th medical center in Rongai, with  #21 opening in Ngong and #22 in Kawangware soon!

Currently, 50% of Penda patient visits are tech-enabled, and they plan to scale this to 90% by the end of the year. What does this mean, and why is it important? A tech-enabled visit is one that is supported by clinical decision support tools – sometimes diagnosis support and sometimes treatment support. For instance, all of Penda's antenatal care visits are supported by interactive checklists ensuring that providers are checking for all of the danger signs that may indicate a high-risk pregnancy. And for those who may be diagnosed with a urinary tract infection, they are making sure that it is easy to prescribe the right molecule to ensure they get better quickly.

Last month, Penda deployed an automated WhatsApp chatbot to open up another channel of patient engagement. Patients can now chat with them via WhatsApp and get all their health matters sorted at the comfort of their homes! To try it out, follow this link: https://wa.me/254207640471

Penda have over 12,000 call center interactions each month. Patients call them for medical consultations, general information, and even drug delivery. Penda call patients to make sure they’re getting better and are staying on schedule with recommended visits, like antenatal care and vaccinations. 

Thanks to COVAX, the vaccine has arrived in Kenya. Penda are working to position themselves to deliver the Covid-19 vaccine to vulnerable populations. See this article by their Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Rob, outlining Penda’s commitment to rapid, effective, and equitable vaccine distribution.

In Jacaranda's February 2021 newsletter they annouce the launch of DELTA, an e-learning platform for healthcare providers across the country, share how they are working with Kakamega County to rethink maternal and newborn health service delivery, and publish their quarterly Impact Report from Q4 2020.

Like many others in the health space, 2020 has been a year of learning and adapting. It has been no different for us at Jacaranda Health. Maternal health has been dramatically impacted by the pandemic, and this year has challenged us to act creatively to ensure that mothers and babies receive quality care when they need it. As this year comes to an end, we reflect on a few achievements our team is proud of and look ahead to the year to come:

• When COVID-19 reached Kenya, our goal was to accelerate the reach of our programs to as many women as possible to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on care-seeking and service delivery. Over the course of 2020, we have doubled our county partnerships, and are now deploying programs in 8 of Kenya’s most populous counties, where nearly 30% of the population lives
• We have reached over 350,00 mothers with our PROMPTS digital health platform, helping mothers to navigate facility restrictions and closures during the country-wide lockdown, and access care at critical moments during pregnancy and postpartum. We have developed new features over the platform, using AI to ‘triage’ women with potential danger signs to our clinical help desk, and creating digital referrals for cases sent from our help desk to healthcare facilities.
• We have also grown our network of in-facility nurse mentors, who support their peers building skills to manage obstetric and neonatal emergencies. We have built a network of 190 in-facility mentors who have mentored over 3,000 healthcare providers in 103 public hospitals. Our team adapted to virtual trainings and support meetings, and kept up morale as healthcare providers stood on the front lines of the pandemic. In order to keep facilitating provider skills development at scale, we are excited to be launching an e-learning platform for healthcare providers, who can access virtual learning modules over their phones.
• We are kicking off a country-wide impact evaluation funded by USAID and with partners at Harvard and IPA.

As we reflect on the challenges and successes of the year, we also look ahead into the coming year with excitement. We remain laser-focused on our target of reaching 1.5 million mothers and babies with our programs by the year 2022 and reaching national scale in Kenya as the standard of care in all public facilities. Our work is getting national recognition, as team members participated in developing the national Ministry of Health guideline for provider mentorship. We are also investigating a pilot in one new country in 2021.

Looking ahead to 2021, our team is excited by the challenges and opportunities that await us. We will keep working to expand and improve along the way, to ensure all mothers and babies get access to the quality care that they deserve.

Nick and Sathy, Executive Directors

If you would like to receive monthly updates from Jacaranda Health Click here