The WHO recommends that every pregnant woman should undergo at least one ultrasound scan, preferably in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, to accurately estimate gestational age, detect fetal anomalies, and improve a woman’s overall pregnancy experience. But in the vast rural areas of Kenya, where trained ultrasound specialists are in short supply and pregnant women may have to travel for many hours to the nearest hospital, that guidance is still a far cry from reality.
That’s why the Philips Foundation, together with local clinical partners and the Ministry of Health, is bringing portable ultrasound into the hands of trained midwives at primary care facilities, while connecting them to experienced specialists in urban hospitals. Through a combination of in-person training, remote education, and real-time video collaboration, the midwives can build the skills and confidence to perform routine basic obstetric screening themselves. This allows them to provide better care and identify high-risk women for timely treatment at an appropriate healthcare center, giving those women a much better chance of bringing a healthy child into the world.
And the virtual collaboration doesn’t end there. It is part of a full digital ecosystem of connected care, in which all relevant patient data – including lab tests and ultrasound data – can be shared across locations for remote diagnostic assistance and monitoring.
In developed nations such as the US, imaging expertise may be more widely available – but it is often unevenly distributed across urban and rural divides. And this problem is only bound to get worse. For example, in maternal care, it is estimated that the shortage of highly skilled obstetricians, gynecologists, and maternal-fetal medicine specialists (MFMs) in the US will increase more than threefold between 2020 and 2050, with shortages becoming increasingly acute in rural areas. Already today, more than 1 in 10 rural women in the US have to drive 100 miles or more to get access to obstetric services [3].
Virtual collaboration can be part of the solution here, too. Using a live collaboration platform integrated into an ultrasound system, an experienced sonographer in a city hospital can remotely assist their local counterpart with an ultrasound exam, while an MFM specialist can use the same platform to discuss the patient’s medical status with her. It no longer matters whether the patient is sitting in the room next to him, or in a clinic at the other end of the state. Virtually, the MFM specialist is always nearby.
Unlike a handheld ultrasound device, we cannot take a 7-ton MR scanner into people’s homes. What we can do, however, is virtually connect imaging experts at a central hub – or what we call a Radiology Operations Command Center – with imaging technologists at scanners across care locations.
This cloud-based hub-and-spoke model enables real-time collaboration and over-the-shoulder support from expert users to their less experienced or specialized colleagues at remote sites, while the patient is on the scanner table. Not only does this help to standardize image quality, it can also make advanced imaging such as MR and CT accessible at more sites, closer to where patients live, at more flexible hours. In the future, such a command center could even operate across country borders, to support image acquisition wherever and whenever it’s needed.
December 13, 2021
- By Jocelyne Mekontso
September 06, 2021
- By Henk van Houten
July 28, 2021
- By Alexandra Gonçalves
June 14, 2021
- By Henk van Houten
June 02, 2021
- By Julia Dmitrieva
March 05, 2021
- By Chip Truwit
November 29, 2020
- By Adeel Yang, MD
November 24, 2020
- By Kees Wesdorp
November 16, 2020
- By Henk van Houten
October 06, 2020
- By Henk van Houten
Select country
Global (English)By clicking on the link, you will be leaving the official Royal Philips Healthcare ("Philips") website. Any links to third-party websites that may appear on this site are provided only for your convenience and in no way represent any affiliation or endorsement of the information provided on those linked websites. Philips makes no representations or warranties of any kind with regard to any third-party websites or the information contained therein.
I understandYou are about to visit a Philips global content page
You are about to visit the Philips USA website.
Our site can best be viewed with the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or Firefox.