Saving Lives at Birth

Saving Lives at Birth is an AI based training app for skilled birth attendants 

Problem: Every year, around 300,000 women and 5 million newborns die of causes related to childbirth. 99% of these deaths happen in low and middle income countries. More than 90 % of maternal deaths are preventable with the presence of a skilled birth attendant during delivery.

Saving Lives at Birth uniquely combines AI and gamification principles to provide an innovative approach to training & assisting skilled birth attendants to provide a safer birth for mothers and newborns everywhere. 

The AI and game based training app simulates real-life complication cases for the user who is typically a nurse or a doctor. The app can talk to the user about a complicated case which she is about to manage in the game. It's natural language processing algorithm can accurately recognise her speech and trigger the further events in the game such as diagnosis and it's management. The AI engine at the back-end is trained to accurately suggest evidence based management for up to 30 cases of complications in the mother and the child.The app has been developed along with Jhpiego India, an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, which works in capacity building of frontline health workers in the area of maternal and child health

The app's user interface design applies gamification elements of driving fun, engagement and rewards which motivates the users to become active consumers of the app. . 

The app simulates around 30 cases of complicated labor in the areas of post-partum hemorrhage, prolonged & obstructed labor, severe eclampsia/pre-eclampsia, pre-term labor, gestational diabetes, malaria & HIV in pregnancy,maternal & child sepsis, and hypothermia to name a few.

All the usage data captured in the app helps generate actionable insights on the clinical skills that need improvement thus providing strategic inputs on further areas of intervention to reduce maternal and new born deaths. 

The app is currently being piloted in 20 out of 80 targeted secondary and tertiary healthcare facilities in the high maternal and child mortality states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh,India in it's 1st phase as part of project ASMAN (Alliance for Saving Mothers and NewBorns, an initiative by 5 major organisations including Gates Foundation, USAID, Tata Trusts, Reliance Foundation & MSD for Mothers)  The app will be used by 750-800 labor room nurses and doctors in this phase.    

Impact: The feedback we have got from the 150 labor room nurses using the app in the pilot phase is highly encouraging. The app is like an assistant to them to manage complicated cases of pregnancies and newborns in the absence of a doctor. This can be a game changer as it can significantly reduce the risk to the mother and the new-born by reinforcing positive behaviours, self confidence and evidence based care among the health workers. We are looking to strengthen this solution further with the help of grant from Solve by widening it's impact to touch more lives.

The app is a perfect example of innovative technology to impact the lives of those handling complicated labor and saving lives on the frontline without doctors to assist them as it helps in: 

1-On-demand assistance in the areas of investigation, diagnosis and  management of complications                        

2- Improve knowledge and skills of the heath workers while providing  crucial data driven insights on their clinical skills

3- Influence positive behaviors while managing complications in real-life thus reducing risks to the mother and the newborn.

The solution uniquely combines machine learning, gamification and data analytics principles. It can talk to the user as well as recognise speech of the user in native language about the observations, history and  clinical examination of patients thereby assisting them to accurately diagnose the complication type. The app's  algorithm is trained to accurately identify and manage around 30 cases of complications. The data analytics helps generate actionable insights on the clinical and decision making skills that need improvement. The app's game based user centric design is fun and motivating for the health workers to become active participants thus driving adoption

Over the next 12 months, the app will be rolled out in all the targeted 80 healthcare facilities of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh targeting 750-800 labor room nurses and doctors in partnership with Jhpiego,India (a non-profit affiliate of Johns Hopkins) Apart from this, there is keen interest to implement it from the states of Maharashtra and Bihar. This will further give us an opportunity to assess the impact of the app on the health-workers, their confidence level, knowledge and skill level and ultimately the impact in reducing the maternal and child mortality rates specific to the intervention areas.  

We are looking to opensource the technology platform as it can have many other applications in the areas such as reproductive health & family planning To begin with we are looking to target countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Philippines and leverage the facilities where the community health workers are known to use smart phones for other mHealth tools.    

The impact we demonstrate at ASMAN can help us attract donor & implementation partners & scale globally. We are working with USAID and Gates Foundation in India and aiming to scale up with their support further in these countries 

The game app can be deployed on playstore or sent as link on whatsapp. The link comes with a video tutorial with a step-by-step guide to download and use the app. The app can be used anytime, anywhere in an online or offline manner without the need of an internet connectivity. 

The app is supported by mobile based remote support centre (RSC) which can guide the user at every step. We are also looking to collaborate with local mobile service operators for the RSC  

The app is currently being used by 150 nurses working in 20 secondary and tertiary healthcare facilities in the districts of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. 

We are working with Jhpiego who are both our knowledge and implementation partners to facilitate the project in the 80 targeted facilities.There is a docking station outside the labor room which has the tablet having the ASMAN game app. The nurses use it to practice key decision-making skills for managing complicated labor. They also refer to it as an on-demand training tool to learn evidence based management of complicated labor   

The game app will be used to train & support decisions while handling complications for 750-800 labor room nurses & doctors in the next 12 months covering a total of 42 facilities in Rajasthan and 39 facilities in Madhya Pradesh where the average load of deliveries reported vary from 700 per month at a district hospital to 240 per month at a sub-district hospital. In the next 3 years we are targeting to directly impact atleast 5000 frontline health workers in Indian states of Bihar & Maharashtra,the African & South-East Asian countries.  

Having worked with Indian IT consulting companies I have spent 8 years coding & consulting in India and the UK. Abhinav Girdhar, co-founder worked in healthcare consulting & investment banking at PwC & Deloitte before we started Bodhi in 2013. Since then we have built an ecosystem of right partners such as Innovations in Healthcare (IIH), Duke University's SEAD accelerator, International Finance Corporation's TechEmerge. Back in India, we are supported by Centre for Innovation Incubation & Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM-Ahmedabad, IIM-Calcutta's Innovation Park and NASSCOM India's 10,000 start-ups.        

Bodhi develops technology based & industry-oriented training products for healthcare professionals. Our training products are used by both public and private healthcare providers to provide orientation as well as in-service training for their staff such as nurses and paramedics. Our products are also used by medical nursing colleges as educational aid for their students. The pricing model for our products is subscription based where depending on the number of subscribers per facility it ranges between $10 to $25 annually.  Some of our customers include public health providers and donor organisations such as Tata Trusts and All India Institute of Medical Sciences- New Delhi. Our customers among the private healthcare providers include Columbia Asia Group of hospitals, Eye-Q chain of super speciality hospitals and NephroPlus Dialysis care group of hospitals.   

The esteemed and diverse panel of people associated with the Fronlines of Health challenge and who are well-known entrepreneurs, academicians & leaders from the philanthropy, business, government & civil society all at one place. I don't think there would be a better platform for Bodhi to showcase our work at the frontlines for saving mothers and new-borns. If we are able to get mentors and advisors  from any of the panel members or the larger Solve community, I believe we have great chances to impact a lot more people than we are able to do today. 

We started Bodhi in 2013 with a vision to improve the health indicators in developing countries by improving the clinical skills of frontline healthcare professionals.Staying true to that vision and backed with good amount of experience implementing technology based training solutions for public health in India we are now looking to scale up. This is only possible by partnering with the right mentors and organisations who are open in adopting new technologies for wider impact whereas Bodhi can leverage their existing resources like digital infrastructure or relationship with local facilities to deploy it's solutions.