Mobile digital health apps have become critical tools for healthcare workers globally, helping them deliver more evidence-based care. Unfortunately, most of these health apps are built in siloes and are program-specific, leading to fragmented patient data and high development costs.

At Google Health, we created Open Health Stack in collaboration with the WHO and a robust community of local developers to improve the sustainability and scalability of digital health tools, especially in low resource areas. The aim is to improve digital health infrastructure globally, making it easier for innovators to create interoperable, standards-based, secure, offline-capable applications.

To celebrate the launch of Open Health Stack, our film showcases how a small group of innovators were able to leverage this technology to build a maternal health app, making it easier for community health workers to save lives.

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.

Health infrastructure in low income areas remains inconsistent, but digital health tools have shown promise in improving health outcomes. The challenge is that funding for these tools are often program-specific, coming from large non-profit organizations that aren't concerned with scalability or sustainability.

With Open Health Stack, we are showing 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 in a sustainable and scalable way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.