Philips Promotes New Telehealth Service in Indonesia

Royal Philips (Philips; Amsterdam, The Netherlands) has entered an agreement with Indonesian Sijunjung Regency (Muaro Sijunjung, Indonesia) to provide mobile obstetrics monitoring (MOM) in the West Sumatra region.

MOM is a scalable, smartphone-based digital health service designed to identify mothers-to-be who are at high risk of pregnancy-related complications and to help reduce maternal mortality rates. It enables midwives in remote locations to share vital measurements, observational data, and mobile ultrasound images with obstetricians and gynecologists in larger hospitals and collaborate with them for improved decision making during pregnancy.

The service features two mobile phone apps; the first allows midwives to collect vital measurement data, such as weight, blood pressure (BP), and temperature, and synchronize it to the MOM web portal; the second app lets doctors track the data to review a woman’s progress. Specialists at regional primary care centers can also access the data via the web portal to monitor women’s conditions in real-time and identify high-risk pregnancies via a dashboard interface. Training and education are also provided as part of the service.

In a one-year pilot project in collaboration with Bunda Medical Center (Padang, Indonesia) that monitored 650 pregnancies, the Philips' MOM solution increased the early detection of high-risk pregnancies three fold and helped expectant mothers to receive the medical monitoring and treatment they needed for a safe delivery. According to Philips, not a single woman died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth through early monitoring and risk stratification.

“Indonesia, with 255 million people living on more than 900 islands, still struggles with one of the highest rates of maternal death in the world, partly due to the lack of access to healthcare services,” said Jeroen Tas, CEO of Healthcare Informatics, Solutions, and Services at Philips. “With the roll-out of our mobile obstetrics monitoring solution in West Sumatra we are helping to give people access to skilled healthcare personnel and the right technology at the right time. It’s a clear example of how digital technologies can facilitate preventative care and have a tremendous impact on the quality of care.”

“It is a challenge for many mothers in this district to travel from their home to the closest clinic, which means that high risk pregnancies are often not detected at an early stage,” said Edwin Suprayogi, MD head of Sijunjung Health District. “With the MOM program, we aim to identify these women much faster so that they get access to the care they need. At the same time, the program will also help us to track the effectiveness of individual healthcare workers so that we can improve their skills and further improve the quality of healthcare.”

The MOM telehealth service is planned to be introduced in other regions in Indonesia, India, and Africa in late 2016.

Related Links:
Royal Philips
Sijunjung Regency
Bunda Medical Center