Mobile
FrontlineSMS:Medic and The Extraordinaries Win Big at NetSquared
Published May 28, 2009 @ 11:16AM PT
First and second prize-winning teams from n2y4: 2nd place project: The Extraordinaries: Mr. Mystery, Ben Rigby, Jacob Colker / 1st place project: FrontlineSMS: Medic - Isaac Holeman, Alex Harsha, Dieterich Law (photo from elstudio)
NetSquared's annual spring conference has become the go-to place to discover innovative social change technology products. Each year, they sponsor a project challenge that gives social tech innovators - usually grouped around some theme - the chance to win cash prizes, mobilize peers, and get great advice. Last year's big winners at the "mapping" themed challenge were crisis info crodwsourcers Ushahidi. While I wasn't able to attend this year, it was clear even from afar that it was all about FrontlineSMS:Medic. The scrappy team of big thinking undergrads, hacks of Ken Banks' FrontlineSMS software in tow, pitched their way to $45,000 in total prizes. They won first place in the Mobile Challenge, where the placement is determined by attendee voting, first place in the Microsoft Mobile Challenge, and were one of five winners of the French American Charitable Trust (FACT) Social Justice Award. FrontlineSMS:Medic will use that money to scale up their model of using mobile phones and simple coordination software to help rural clinics provide higher quality and more comprehensive home health care with lower travel costs.
Also rocking the casbah were on-demand mobile volunteer shop The Extraordinaries. I've been so excited to see how persistent these guys have been, how much more developed their ideas have become, and how much traction they've started to get. For my money, they're doing some of the best thinking about how to find and supply small, meaningful tasks to people who want to contribute. I love their screenshot with resume review. I would review 20 resumes a day. The Extraordinaries won second prize in the Mobile Challenge and were also awarded with a FACT Social Justice Award.
For anyone looking to fund innovative new projects or just looking for a does of inspiration, it's worth checking out the whole list of featured projects. This year's featured projects may be next year's winners (just ask The Extraordinaries). Congrats to all who participated and NetSquared for another great conference. FrontlineSMS: Medic describing their project:
The Extraordinaries:
200,000 People Potentially Better Off After One Week of Hope Phones
Published May 22, 2009 @ 12:47PM PT
Earlier this week, I wrote about the Hope Phones campaign, a new project that helps you turn your old, unwanted cell phones into a live saving tool for a more equitable global health system.
To recap, the project is being run by FrontlineSMS:Medic, and the basic idea is that when you give a clinic and it's community health works access to a mobile phone and simple software for tracking and responing to specific patient concerns, you can dramatically improve the breadth and quality of care, even in a rural setting.
Hope Phones works through a partnership with a phone reseller. They take your old donated phone, and donate to FrontlineSMS:Medic the money that would have otherwise been given to you. FrontlineSMS: Medic in turn buys the $10 cellphones they use standard in the field. It takes about 100-150 phones to get a rural clinic fully on the grid.
FrontlineSMS:Medic estimates that each phone we donate results in 2-3 phones they can provide to their partner clinics. Each of those phones, in turn, can help improve care for approximately 50 families.
So far, 336 phones have been donated. Taking that each of those become 2-3 phones in the field, that each of those phones help about 50 families get on the grid, and that each of those families represents 5 or so people (probably a low estimate).
That means that in a week, just a couple hundred people donating something they're no longer using means that over 200,000 people could see serious improvements in the quality of their health care access. Of course the real work will happen on the ground and in the implementation, and nothing is guaranteed, but that is a powerful statement about global connectivity.
Your Old Phone Can Change The World
Published May 18, 2009 @ 06:11AM PT
(photo courtesy of ICT4D.at on Flickr)
Every day, more than 450,000 mobile phones find their way into desk drawers or trash cans around the US. But while these discarded phones may mean little to their owners, they can be put to work on the front lines of global health. Hope Phones is a new campaign by FrontlineSMS:Medic to transform your old phone into a tool for developing a more equitable, horizontal global health system.
I wrote a post a few months ago called "The Cellphone That Could Change the World." The post was focused on some new innovations coming out of UCLA that were poised to turn the camera lens on an average mobile into a portable diagnostics lab. More than that, however, the post was a speculation about how the pieces of the emerging mobile health (mHealth) field seemed to be converging, with powerful implications:
It's 2011, and a lot has changed in our approach to global health promotion. First, we've established a Department of Development that recognizes that prevention goes a lot further than treatment, and has begun to make strategic investments in technology and training around the world. Michael Kleinman is the director, with Paul Farmer as his Senior Adviser, of course. One of the early initiatives was the promotion of a global health corps which was focused on training community health workers, the backbone of most health systems. To enable even more effective home care, these community health workers have cell-phones outfitted with the LUCAS mobile test system above, and use Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS technology to immediately send results to a global epidemiological database from which regional and international teams can analyze trends in disease prevalence. Nonprofits and national agencies consult with the doctors monitoring the global database to design interventions that strategically head-off possible epidemics. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies who have negotiated lower rates with national governments, mediated by partners like the Clinton Foundation, employ a partnership with Coca-Cola to use their delivery trucks to get life saving drugs to even the most inaccessible regions. And of course, patients being treated can use their own cheap mobile phones to send messages to health workers about updates in their condition.
One of the most exciting developments since I wrote the post has been the emergence of FrontlineSMS:Medic, a collaboration that formed when a number of undergraduate and graduate students realized that they were working on pieces of the same puzzle.
FrontlineSMS:Medic uses recycle mobile phones, laptops, and the FrontlineSMS software to create health networks which enable rural clinics to provide better, more extensive care. From the Hope Phones press release:
Its first pilot project distributed cell phones to community health workers in 100 rural villages in Malawi, saving thousands of dollars in travel and hospital costs and doubling the number of patients treated for tuberculosis in the catchment area.
The organization uses FrontlineSMS, a free, open-source software program that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem, and cell phones. Their pilot implementation model places a laptop running FrontlineSMS in a central clinic and distributes cell phones to healthcare workers to coordinate care with patients in peripheral villages. Their programs currently serve 1.2 million patients in Malawi and Uganda. Future development of the FrontlineSMS:Medic platform will encompass electronic medical records and diagnostics at the point of care.
The campaign works by enabling you to print a barcode, throw your old phone in the mail (shipping is free) to phone refurbisher The Wireless Source. The money that The Wireless Source would have paid you is instead converted to phones that can be used by clinics around the world. The average phone used by FrontlineSMS:Medic only costs $10 and can bring 50 families on the grid.
“Hope Phones lets you give your old cell phone new life on the frontline of global health. That’s powerful,” said Josh Nesbit, Executive Director of FrontlineSMS:Medic. “Just one, old Blackberry will allow us to purchase 3-5 cell phones for healthcare workers, bringing another 250 families onto the health grid via SMS. Old phones can help save lives.”
To learn more about the campaign, check out HopePhones.org or use the widget below.
Simple ways to help:
1. Visit www.HopePhones.org and donate your old phones.
2. Spread the word!
- Email your friends, family, classmates and coworkers.
- Post on Facebook and become a fan of the Hope Phones page.
- Tell the world on Twitter - use #HopePhones as a tag so we can thank you.
- Let us know if you want the Hope Phones widget for your website or blog.
3. Contact us at info@hopephones.org if you’d like to help set up a Hope Phones collection center.
Mother's Day Flower Fail and the Power of Feedback for Aid
Published May 11, 2009 @ 01:48PM PT
What if we could amplify, aggregate, and publicize the feedback loop in international development?
There is an interesting story TechCrunch just posted about the anger the Twittersphere is expressing towards flower companies for failing to deliver flowers on time for Mother's Day. Very reasonably angered customers have been venting and sites like Twendz.com have been keeping track of the collective sentiment.
We did a sentiment analysis
of tweets about FTD’s brand using Twendz,
Interestingly, another well-known flower company is trying a proactive approach to make amends:
There is also negative buzz on Twitter about 1800Flowers.com
This is the power of real-time feedback and new communications channels for instant responsiveness. Nothing like this currently exists in the world of international aid. There is simply no good, scalable way for individuals around the world to give feedback on aid and development programs.
But as cell-phones become increasingly ubiquitous, and as people build services aimed at extending access - even if its not full time access - to communications technology across the whole of the base of the pyramid, there would seem to be an opportunity for someone to build a tool or service that makes it easier for people to report and reflect on the services they're supposed to have access to.
In the short term, this might be a scary loss of power for some organizations, but I have to believe that in the long-run, we understand that this sort of listening loop is not about "proving" your organization is doing good work but constantly working to improve your impact.
