The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)in collaboration with Accelerate Health, launched a global technological challenge to learn about proposals and initiatives that improve maternal health outcomes.
The event will be named Global Maternal Health Tech Challenge, and is reported to be launched in January 2021. Through virtual competencies to be held in virtual format, projects that will participate in the final will be chosen at the HIMSS Global Conference in person on August 10, 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Competences will be divided into regions, to promote collaboration and participation of different countries. The regions will be Europe, Africa, Latin America, North America and Asia. Accelerate Health and HIMSS are currently collaborating with a diverse group of stakeholders and actors. “The results of the roundtable will refine the scope of the tech challenge, which will be hosted on a virtual platform and posed to a broad community of developers, designers, entrepreneurs and others interested in developing innovative solutions to healthcare problems,” says the official HIMSS announcement.
This initiative arises, due to the high number of maternal mortalities, according to UNICEF data in 2017, around 295,000 women lost their lives during the pregnancy and childbirth process, and 94% of these deaths occurred in contexts of poverty and low resources.
“We are a neutral, global player to bring this forward and do it in a manner in which there’s no personal interest here other than just improving health. And that’s really what we want to do, so it’s exciting we can finally do it on a big scale like this.” explained Kerry Amato, Executive Director of Health Innovation at HIMSS.
