Projects We're Working On

Developing countries like India face the double burden of infectious and chronic diseases. Given the high cost of treating chronic diseases, it's imperative that health systems in these countries are re-oriented towards prevention. We have partnered with one of India's leading healthcare providers, Narayana Hrudyalaya, to use Sana to screen and manage chronic diseases in rural and semi-urban India. The initial focus will be on two disease groups: Oral/Cervical Cancer and Cardiovascular Diseases such as Coronary Heart Disease, Arrhythmias, and Heart Failure. We aim to train health workers and general physicians to use Sana to screen and manage these conditions, thus completing the "last mile" of telemedicine. Additionally, we aim to study the cost-effectiveness, scalability and sustainability of such a set-up.

Sana has been presented with a unique opportunity to partner with one of Mexico’s most prestigious technological institutions, the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) and its Ignacio A. Santos School of Medicine, considered one of the top three in the country. ITESM, Mexico’s largest private educational institution, has 31 campuses across the nation and is headquartered in Monterrey.

Our initial collaboration is an academic one: the Sana mHealth Lab jointly taught by ITESM and MIT instructors. The course, delivered via satellite link and complemented by a robust online component, would leverage the combined intellectual capital of Mexico’s leading healthcare experts and students and MIT staff and students to help customize an array of tactical mobile medical tools. Similar in intent to the diagnostic and emergency response applications Sana has developed in other environments, these are designed to address Mexico's unique healthcare provision landscape and logistics infrastructure.

A longer-range envisioned collaboration is the nationwide testing of these applications with ITESM coordinating simultaneous distribution through its multiple campuses and the possible involvement of two other internationally ranked Mexican universities as well.

The rector of the Monterrey campus, Dr. Alberto Bustani Adem, is the executive with overall responsibility for the collaboration from ITESM’s side. Within the Ignacio A. Santos School of Medicine, Dr. Antonio Dávila Rivas, director of graduate studies, and Dr. Enrique Javier Saldivar Ornelas, director of international affairs, have executive responsibility.

From the MIT side, staff from NextLab (Jhonatan Rotberg, founder and a Mexican national, and Geoffrey Groesbeck, former executive director of international affairs at ITESM) will participate, along with staff and students drawn from multiple disciplines and divisions.

We are partnering with academic, government, and nonprofit institutions in Manila to improve delivery of health care to rural and conflict areas in the Philippines. Our champions from Asia Pacific College have started a local developer community, and will serve as the technical and operational support for ongoing projects there. Our approach has been to identify existing clinical needs and then co-develop both technical and human solutions to achieve positive outcomes. Together with our partners, we recognize that technology alone will not achieve health care redesign, and so we are offering an academic program called the Sana mHealth Lab that brings together experts and students from the business, medical, public health, and engineering disciplines to educate stakeholders on how to design, implement, and measure health outcomes for mobile health technologies. This course will be offered by MIT, with a planned distance-learning component at Ateneo de Manila University. Please watch our official projects page for ongoing updates and news on our progress.

One of our members recently received the 2010 Davis Projects for Peace Fellowship. He will use the $10,000 award to bring a Sana team member with him to Manila this summer to help local champions from Manila and Mindanao extend primary care to conflict-ridden zones in this southern province, a large island in the Philippines where religious extremists and military violence severely limit local citizens' access to adequate health care.