Sana: Providing Hope for Healthcare through Mobile Technology

...The number of trained medical professionals in the world’s rural regions falls direly short of need. According to the Work Bank, 13 African countries have fewer than five physicians per 100,000 people.  Malawi, with its healthcare workforce in perhaps the most calamitous state, has only 2.22 physicians per 100,000 people. Where healthcare workers are abundant, they may not be able to dispense adequate care or accurately screen ailing patients. Compounding the problem of delivering affordable and effective healthcare is the lack of permanent and portable medical records, lack of medical diagnostic services, poor supply chains for replacing medical equipment, poor treatment compliances, slow rates of information flow, and lack of quality auditing to identify bottlenecks and quantify healthcare improvements.

Sana was born to bridge the human expertise gap between resource-poor settings like rural India and large centers of medical know-how. Sana – Spanish and Italian for “healthy” and Filipino for “hope” – is a volunteer-run organization in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The organization began in 2008 when founder Dr. Leo Anthony Celi was taking the Media Lab’s ICT4D class (Information and Communication Technologies for Development, now known as NextLab), and was formerly known as MoCa. As a pioneer of mobile health (a.k.a. mHealth), Sana revolutionizes healthcare delivery in remote areas through innovative mobile information services that improve patient access to medical specialists. Distributive physician support and patient oversight through mobile technology enable faster, higher quality, and more cost-effective patient tracking, diagnosis, and intervention...