Deploying AI at Scale for Maternal Health

Abstract MomConnect is a national mobile health initiative that supports pregnant women and new mothers in South Africa by delivering personalized health messages about pregnancy, newborn care, and maternal health through WhatsApp and SMS. A help desk allows users to ask questions and receive real-time responses from healthcare providers employed by the National Department of Health. A high volume of queries to the MomConnect help desk can overwhelm operators and cause delays. To address this, the Ask a Question service has been integrated into MomConnect, automatically matching user questions to a database of preapproved frequently asked questions. Ask a Question uses natural language processing techniques to understand and respond to user queries, correct misspellings, process grammatically incorrect sentences, comprehend colloquial terms, and identify urgent questions. Since the rollout of Ask a Question on MomConnect in 2022, more than 880,000 user queries have been matched, and over 100,000 urgent queries escalated to the help desk, with an accuracy of 83% on frequently asked question matching and 85% on urgency detection. This has helped to reduce the burden on healthcare workers and ensured that urgent help desk cases receive prompt attention.