StanaCard: Medic Mobile Helps Millions by Bringing Texting to Hospital's in Africa

ABC News recently featured a story that I think our readers would be very interested in. The story was about an organization called Medic Mobile and its co-founder Josh Nesbit. Josh was traveling abroad for a summer program in Malawi during his sophomore year at Stanford when he came up with the idea that would eventually become the basis for Medic Mobile and Hope Phones, organizations that aims to bring healthcare to over 50 million patients worldwide.

Medic Mobile provides training so workers can quickly
and easily send texts for help during emergencies.

In Malawi, Josh was volunteering at St. Gabriel’s, a children’s HIV hospital that served about 250,000 people spread out 100 miles in each direction of the hospital. The hospital had a nurse who would ride a motorcycle for 10 hours a day in search of patients. Josh realized that if he could set up a network and get the workers cell phones, this problem could be avoided completely.

Back at Stanford, Josh found a software engineer who could make it happen by setting up an open source SMS network called Frontline SMS, and collected about 100 recycled mobile phones. He took the software and phones back to Malawi, and set up a network for the hospital where its workers could send and receive texts over 100 miles. The smaller, rural health centers were now able to text St. Gabriel’s when they received a patient who needed urgent care. In six months, over 130 patients received care that wouldn’t have otherwise, and the amount of patients treated for tuberculosis doubled.

Josh then realized that this idea could turn into something bigger, but he knew he needed a lot more phones to be able to make it happen. This is when he got the idea to use money from recycled phones to buy new phones to give to the workers. He knew that over 500,000 mobile phones a day were discarded into the trash, or were sitting around not being used.

Josh did the math and realized that he could buy phones for 1 million health workers with the money from recycling just one percent of the 182.5 million discarded phones per year. Every phone donated to Hope Phones can turn into 2-3 new phones for health workers, and each one of those new phones will connect 50-100 families. Frontline SMS has become Medic Mobile, and has since connected over 3.5 million people, and set up networks in 10 countries in Africa.

To learn more about Medic Mobile, visit their website here or follow them on Twitter (@Medic). If you would like to donate phones to the program, please go to the Hope Phones website here or follow them on Twitter (@HopePhones). Hope Phones was launched by Medic Mobile as a phone collection campaign in 2009.