Increasing Impact of Mobile Health Programs: SAHELI for Maternal and Child Care

Underserved communities face critical health challenges due to lack of access timely and reliable information. Nongovernmental organizations are leveraging the widespread use cellphones combat these healthcare spread preventative awareness. The workers at reach out individually beneficiaries; however such programs still suffer from declining engagement. We have deployed SAHELI, a system efficiently utilize limited availability for improving maternal child in India. SAHELI uses Restless Multiarmed Bandit (RMAB) framework identify beneficiaries outreach. It is first application RMABs public health, already continuous by our partner NGO, ARMMAN. reached ~100K with on track serve 1 million end 2023. This scale impact has been achieved through multiple innovations RMAB model its development, preparation real world data, deployment practices; careful consideration responsible AI practices. Specifically, this paper, we describe approach learn past data improve performance SAHELI’s model, real-world faced during adoption end-to-end pipeline.