Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Copenhagen, Denmark – Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA) today announced that its Mobile Obstetrics Monitoring (MOM) telehealth service received the highest commendation from the GBCHealth’s 2016 Business Action on Health Awards: Women and Girls. Philips’ scalable smartphone-based connected health service designed to enable identification of mothers-to-be who are at high risk of pregnancy-related complications and to help reduce maternal mortality rates. Expanding mobile monitoring coverage, it addresses both rural and urban needs and is part of Philips’ strategy of providing connected care solutions that span across locations and enable access to high-quality integrated care. The award was presented on May 17, 2016 at the 4th Women Deliver Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“We’re honored to see our obstetrics monitoring telehealth service recognized at such an influential event for helping to improve the lives of women who struggle with high-risk pregnancies,” said Derek Smith, General Manager, Hospital to Home, Philips. “With this app-based solution we are enabling clinicians to identify these women much faster, including in remote rural areas. It has shown that giving women access to skilled healthcare personnel and the right healthcare technology at the right time is helping to prevent complications before they even occur. This can have a tremendous impact on the quality of maternity care and the health of both mother and unborn child.”

The Challenge
About 830 women die from pregnancy- or childbirth-related complications around the world every day, with 99% of these deaths occurring in growth geographies and poor and rural areas [1]. Philips mobile obstetrics monitoring service aims to reduce maternal mortality by enabling healthcare systems to give expectant mothers access to high-quality healthcare wherever they are. During a one-year pilot program in collaboration with the Bunda Medical Center in Padang, Indonesia, the mobile obstetrics monitoring service helped to increase the early detection of high-risk pregnancies three fold and not a single woman out of over 650 pregnancies enrolled in the pilot died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. The first full-scale implementation of this innovative connected health solution took place in the Sijunjung region of West Sumatra, Indonesia in January 2016.

“West Sumatra recently was the first district in Indonesia to implement a full-scale commercial version of the mobile obstetrics monitoring service after the hugely successful pilot program in Padang,” said Health District Head, Dr. Edwin Suprayogi. “We are already seeing how it helps to make a difference in the lives of mothers in this region who have difficultly traveling from their home to the closest clinic. Without this access to care, high risk pregnancies are often times detected too late. This telehealth implementation helps identify these women much sooner so that they are able to receive the quality care they need wherever they are.”

Philips Mobile Obstetrics Monitoring service
The MOM service features two mobile phone apps, as well as training and education. The first app allows midwives to collect vital measurement data such as weight, blood pressure and temperature, and sync it to the MOM web portal. The second lets doctors track this data and review a woman’s pregnancy condition. Specialists at regional primary care centers can also access the data via a MOM web portal to monitor women’s conditions and assess high-risk pregnancies via a dashboard interface.

4th Women Deliver Conference
The Women Deliver Conference is one of the world’s largest global conferences on health, rights, gender equality, education, wellbeing and economic empowerment of girls and women. The 2016 Conference brought together over 5,000 attendees including advocates, policymakers, journalists, young people, researchers and leaders of the private sector and civil society to showcase what it means and how it works when women and girls become the focus of development efforts.

The Philips white paper “Mobile Obstetrics Monitoring (MOM) as a model for community-based antenatal care delivery in a low-resource setting” can be downloaded here. Recognizing the impact of MOM Frost & Sullivan recently named Philips Indonesia Telehealth Company of the Year for 2015.

[1] WHO data