A healthcare nonprofit wants to build a “moonshot factory” like Google X and Bell Labs. The goal: to bring data science and precision health to remote villages in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Medic Mobile just secured $3 million in seed funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the nation’s oldest philanthropies, to launch a global health technology accelerator to pursue this goal. Medic Labs is a new R&D unit that will incubate breakthrough ideas in data science and precision health and bring these innovations to the poorest, hardest-to-reach communities in the world, Medic Mobile leaders said.
“New datasets and precision approaches to clinical practice are transforming healthcare for the wealthy, and it is time for the powerful insights underlying this shift to strengthen health systems serving the poorest and hardest-to-reach communities," said Isaac Holeman, Ph.D., co-founder of Medic Mobile and head of Medic Labs.
Founded in 2010 by Holeman and co-founder Josh Nesbit, San Francisco-based Medic Mobile is a technology-focused nonprofit organization that creates apps for community health workers providing care to people who lack reasonable access to doctors.
These health workers serve patients in remote areas of Uganda, Kenya, Nepal, India, and 10 other countries. In western Uganda, for instance, a community health worker may visit a pregnant woman who lives more than 35 miles from the nearest clinic.
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Scaling ideas
Working with partner organizations including Last Mile Health, Harvard Medical School, and the University of California San Francisco, Medic Mobile developed an open-source technology project, called Community Health Toolkit, to help build digital tools for community health workers.
More than 27,000 health workers use Medic Mobile's apps to help provide care for over 15 million people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Cellphones enable community health workers in remote villages to communicate, in real-time, with the rural clinics they serve. With this mind, Medic Mobile designed apps that can be used on basic phones, commonly distributed by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government health offices to their workers.
The apps provide tools to help health workers track their patients’ health conditions along with care guides prompting workers to perform certain health screenings or diagnostic tests. The apps also offer text messaging for better care coordination, decision support tools and care protocols.
The software also helps to link all this information back to rural clinics and hospitals.
Today, half the world lacks access to essential services, and by 2030, the world will face a shortage of 18 million health workers. The current model of community health, based on static care and protocols, is ripe for large-scale change, Holeman said.
The new technology accelerator builds on this work and will play a crucial role in developing what Holeman calls “precision public health” to create human-centered solutions that help community health systems to reach more people in need.
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Pursuing "moonshot ideas"
Medic Labs, as a separate unit, will pursue "moonshot ideas"—in the tradition of dedicated R&D arms of major technology companies like Microsoft Research—to drive better community health outcomes for people through the equitable application of data science, according to the organization.
“Moonshot ideas have generated innovations that have transformed the lives of many. Medic Labs is applying this approach to generating new ideas that have the potential to advance precision in public health and improve health for all," said Naveen Rao, M.D., senior vice president of health at The Rockefeller Foundation.
One “moonshot” idea is to take data from patient visits—1.2 million patient encounters each month—and use analytics to identify the most vulnerable, high-risk patients. Health systems in these remote areas can then zero in on those patients and the social barriers that are preventing them from being healthy, Holeman said.
The goal of the tech accelerator is to build an R&D pipeline to work with other organizations in developing innovative technologies to be used in these areas of the world, Holeman said.
“Some of these initiatives will be quicker wins and we could be using them within the next year. Other projects that are technically ambitious, we might be working on for a decade,” he said.
Initially, Medic Labs will focus on three areas—human-centered design, data integration, such as analyzing datasets on health and how social determinants like transportation and weather impact people's health, and also interoperability and third-party solution integration.