An emergency service for Kenya

A new mother faces a life-threatening complication: Doctors believe she has a retained placenta and needs surgery, but the hospital has no operating theater. When this happened in Kenya not long ago, the hospital called an ambulance through Flare, an emergency service cofounded by Caitlin Dolkart, MBA ’16.  

Before Flare launched in 2017, response time for an ambulance in Nairobi—which had no service similar to 911—averaged 162 minutes. “Most people can’t survive an emergency for nearly three hours,” Dolkart says.

Today, Flare’s response time there averages 15 minutes—and the company is the largest provider of emergency services in the country. Operating as Rescue.co, Flare provides 24/7 emergency care by connecting patients to ambulances.

“In the US, you don’t think of having a baby as an emergency,” says Dolkart, a Chicago native who lives in Kenya. But she notes that few Kenyan hospitals have operating theaters, so ambulances are crucial when complications develop: “In Kenya, you hear all the time about a mother losing her life because she couldn’t get a C-section.” Fortunately, the ambulance team called about the retained placenta brought ultrasound equipment and found that the mother didn’t need surgery; her baby had a twin, which they then delivered.

Dolkart planned to become a doctor when she graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2007. She went into consulting to gain real-world experience before medical school but then realized “there’s so much more to health care.” 

She took a job with the nonprofit Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and soon set a new goal: to work in the investment sector to support health care in emerging markets. That brought her to MIT, where she began looking for a problem to solve. Having lived in Kenya during her time with CHAI, she focused on the challenge of accessing emergency care there.

She discovered that Kenya had ambulances but lacked coordination of services. Flare matches a patient’s needs with available health services, then provides transportation to the appropriate hospital; it has handled about 30,000 emergencies since launch and is working to scale up. Dolkart says two-thirds of the world lacks effective emergency management services.

While Flare responds to all kinds of emergencies (heart attacks, car accidents, broken bones), Dolkart says she’s particularly proud of how it’s helping women access critical but scarce maternity care. “Those are the stories I connect with most,” she says, “being a mother and knowing it shouldn’t be that way.”