Sustainable Development Goals > People

MAMA'S HUB, BUILT ON OPEN HEALTH STACK

GOOGLE MARKETING, New York / GOOGLE HEALTH / 2023

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Overview

Credits

Overview

Background

For the launch of Google Health’s ‘Open Health Stack’, we created a film that captures the real, tangible, and critical work that community health volunteers do in countries like Kenya, and how technology can help them reduce maternal mortality. Our creative drew connections between the day-to-day of healthcare workers and the benefits of digital tools.

Every day, almost 800 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. This is particularly prevalent in countries like Kenya, where health systems are underresourced.

Open Health Stack, which was built in collaboration with the WHO, is a suite of open source components that can accelerate digital health ecosystems in low resource settings. These tools can help developers and health systems build interoperable, standards-based, offline-capable apps that expand access to life saving care, even in the most rural communities. This video supported a launch at a live event in New York City.

Describe the cultural / social / political climate and the significance of the work within this context

We live in a time with massive healthcare inequality. Low resource settings account for 90% of the global burden of disease, yet only account for 12% of health spending. This is coupled with a projected shortage of 10 million healthcare workers by 2030, primarily in low income countries.

Preventable maternal mortality remains high, but community health workers are delivering life-saving care on the frontlines. With the rise of digital health apps, these healthcare workers can enable equitable access to data-driven healthcare in underresourced areas.

The Open Health Stack film shows the power of a digital transformation in healthcare, and how building developer tools with the WHO can help spark local innovation of healthcare tools that empower community health workers. Ultimately this film brings to life the real-life benefits of technology, and highlights a hopeful future where pregnant women can expect the same level of care, no matter where they live.

Describe the creative idea

Technology has the potential to radically expand access to essential health services, but the real, emotional benefits of technology in healthcare aren’t always clear. In this film, we set out to draw a connection between healthcare technology and the everyday heroes that are using this technology to save lives.

Creatively, we decided to follow the continuum of care, showcasing the healthcare realities in rural Kenya while highlighting genuine interactions between healthcare workers and pregnant women. That brought us to Mama’s Hub, which showcases the potential that technology has in improving care coordination. By working with the communities we are looking to impact, we were able to come up with an authentic creative that showcases the everyday realities and hopeful nature of healthcare in low income communities. It was crucial that we show the everyday work of community health workers, while drawing a connection to the impact of technology.

Describe the strategy

To position and message Open Health Stack, we did extensive quantitative and qualitative research with community health workers, developers, the WHO, and ministries of health in places like Kenya, Nigeria, India, and Indonesia. We followed community health workers around, building an understanding of their day-to-day lives and how we could best serve them.

With a multifaceted target audience of developers, health ministries, NGOs, and more, it was important to create creative that was understandable and compelling to a technical and non-technical audience. For this, we decided to film a type of case study, showcasing how innovators could benefit from Open Health Stack to build high quality health apps in record time.

We identified an organic adopter of Open Health Stack, and worked with them to tell the story of Mama’s Hub. This required extensive private & public collaboration to feature a wide range of characters while communicating the value proposition.

Describe the execution

We had 1 month to develop the brief, align on creative, select a partner, organize logistics, film onsite in Kenya, and go through post-production. This required us to work nimbly, quickly pivoting our creative vision while organizing things like visas and filming approvals. We filmed for 4 consecutive days all over Kenya, going between rural and urban areas.

Ultimately, the film was timed with the Open Health Stack launch at “The Check Up” event from Google Health. We screened the film during the event, and it was endorsed by the Director of Digital Health at the WHO. We placed the film on YouTube, on Google’s blog, and on a variety of Google social media channels, amplifying its reach to 10s of thousands of views. This film will be used for months and years to come, drawing an emotional tie to developer tools that hope to improve peoples lives at scale.

Describe the results / impact

Open Health Stack has reached over 1 million beneficiaries from apps that were built using these open source components, and we expect this number to grow drastically in coming months. The film, which was screened at Open Health Stack’s launch at “The Check Up” from Google Health, increased awareness, familiarity, and understanding of Open Health Stack. Alain Labrique, Director of Digital Health at the WHO, also endorsed Open Health Stack on-stage.

Through this film, we generated more than 50 press articles, hundreds of social posts, and triggered dozens of inquiries for partnership. We also received inbound for case studies, which resulted in 4 net new case studies from partners sharing how they are using Open Health Stack. This all contributes to creating a robust ecosystem of health developers that are now advocating for Open Health Stack and creating standards-based healthcare apps in record time.

Is there any cultural context that would help the jury understand how this work was perceived by people in the country where it ran?

Healthcare in countries like Kenya is not delivered in the same way as in high income countries. Rather than centralized health systems, healthcare is often delivered in a more distributed way, with unpaid community health volunteers with little training acting as the liaison between a community and a ministry of health. Their work is hard and not monetarily rewarding, and requires manual labor and processes. To tell the story properly, we often faced bureaucratic and cultural challenges, requiring multiple levels of approvals for filming in health systems and communities.

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