LAUNCHpad for Innovation

In rural Malawi, each hospital serves hundreds of thousands of patients within a 100-mile radius. To reach remote patients, hospitals rely on trained volunteer community health workers. It was at one such hospital that Josh Nesbit met Dickson Mtanga, a subsistence farmer and health volunteer. Dickson had to walk 35 miles to submit hand-written reports on 25 HIV-positive patients in his community. And yet the information could have been transmitted via SMS messaging (cell phone-based text messaging) in 35 seconds.

In February 2009, Nesbitt, Isaac Holeman, and a group of students from Stanford and Lewis & Clark universities founded FrontlineSMS:Medic. The organization would later become Medic Mobile and would begin to change the face of rural health care for thousands of people in Malawi and beyond. The mission would help health workers communicate, coordinate patient care, and provide diagnostics using low-cost, appropriate technology.

The project, dubbed LAUNCH, has received assistance from a unique government and private-sector partnership led by USAID, NASA, Nike Inc., and the State Department. Its goal is to identify, support, and help take to market creative technologies and other solutions that address global sustainability problems—especially those related to international development. Medic Mobile is now working with another LAUNCH innovator—Ozcan Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley—to tie microscopes to cell phones to do field-based lab tests and send the tests to the clinics centrally.