Medic Mobile has announced the creation of Medic Labs, a new global health technology accelerator, with $3 million in seed funding from The Rockefeller Foundation.
The non-profit organization aims to advance good health and human flourishing for the hardest-to-reach communities and envisions a world in which good health is a secured human right.
In many developing countries there are critical shortages of highly educated health care professionals. An emerging solution often referred to as “last mile health,” are Community Health Workers who are given a limited amount of training, supplies, and support to provide essential primary health care services to the population.
Medic Mobile is the technical steward of the Community Health Toolkit open-source project which empowers more than 27,000 health care workers to provide care for over 12 million people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
In the tradition of the dedicated R&D groups of major technology companies, Medic Labs will pursue moonshot ideas to drive better community health outcomes for all people, everywhere, through the application of data science.
“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.”
Isaac Holeman, PhD, Co-Founder of Medic Mobile and Head of Medic Labs
In the coming months, Medic Labs expects to form new partnerships with health systems, co-founders, and other innovative organizations to further expand on its ambitious R&D agenda. Initially, Medic Labs will focus on three areas:
- Human-centered design: Reimagining how data is used to improve software interfaces that support health workers in their daily activities, making service provision more intuitive.
- Data integration: Sourcing, analyzing, and deploying new and innovative datasets on health and the Social Determinants of Health, including transportation and weather, into the CHT ecosystem to gain a greater understanding of factors that affect healthcare.
- Data interoperability and third-party solution integration: Combining third-party applications with the CHT to increase access to data and improve community health outcomes.
To support Medic Mobile, visit https://medicmobile.org/donate.