CELL PHONES FOR HEALTH
THE IDEA
Cell phone text messages that save lives:
reusing cell phones and cheap text messaging to help health organizations extend care via community health workers
Josh Nesbit
Josh showed up at Stanford as a soccer star and is leaving as a social entrepreneur. He ran into a cool technology that allows cell phones and a laptop to create a cheap text-messaging network, and ended up splitting his time between Stanford and a hospital in rural Malawi. Josh graduated in June 2009, navigating thesis deadlines while running the organization from his dorm room.
Using text messages to save lives is just one way that mobile technologies can dramatically revolutionize health care in Africa.
It’s estimated that there is a shortage of more than 4 million doctors and nurses in the third World. The best way to deliver effective HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis care is to create networks of community health workers (CHWs), but it is hard to support them and coordinate care. Josh Nesbit saw an opportunity to take a simple technology called FrontLine SMS – a way to create communications via a single laptop and cell phones - and apply it to CHW systems. He launched a pilot program with 100 recycled cell phones and a donated laptop with a rural hospital in Malawi. They connected 100 CHWs to the clinical staff and hospital resources using simple text messaging, and had remarkable results. Current pilots in Uganda and Malawi each serve more than 1 million people. Josh has made it simple for new organizations to adopt the technology and 30 clinics in 20 countries will be replicating the system in 2009.

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