What is Virtual Mentor?
Learn more about the problem and how Virtual Mentor fits into the solution.
About 300,000 women die each year during and following pregnancy and childbirth. The vast majority of these deaths (94%) occur in low-resource settings, and most can be prevented. The 3 complications that cause most maternal deaths are severe bleeding (mostly bleeding after childbirth), infections (usually after childbirth), and high blood pressure during pregnancy (pre-eclampsia and eclampsia).
Severe bleeding, infection, and high blood pressure can all be treated with timely and correct medication administration and actions that support the mother’s vital body functions. One million newborns die each year within the first 24 hours after birth, and 30% of these deaths could be prevented if health workers correctly complete the actions that help struggling babies to breathe. We aim to decrease preventable death by 30% among women and newborns within 24 hours of birth by placing Virtual Mentor with every skilled birth worker.
Health workers desire decision support to provide the highest quality of care using available resources. Faced with the most dangerous maternal-newborn emergencies, frontline health care workers must draw on knowledge and skills that may be distant memories or out-of-date while they work alone in remote facilities.
Virtual Mentor is a hands-free decision-support chatbot that engages the health worker in an algorithmic, audible conversation through the most efficient and effective response to a crisis. Conversation scripts rely on global, national, and local guidelines and are crafted by teams of health workers representing every level of care within a system.
At the bedside of every mother and infant, Virtual Mentor augments health care capacity by elevating each worker to the highest scope of practice and minimizes human errors associated with imperfect information recall and anxiety.
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Learn more about our process and how we work with health workers to shape Virtual Mentor