DANVILLE — A medical student from Danville is a partner with a new nonprofit organization distributing cell phones to community health workers in developing countries in the world.
The phones, which FrontlineSMS:Medic is able to provide to them, are the link between clinics and villages sometimes located more than 100 miles away, said Nadim Mahmud, a first-year medical student at Stanford University in California, and 2004 Danville Area High School graduate. He is a son of Zeenat and Faruq Mahmud, of Danville.
He, another medical student and two recent undergraduate students founded the nonprofit organization in February.
“Everything is text-messaged. A lot of developing countries have no access to clinics or are so far away they can only walk to get there. We have partnered with health workers and have recruited volunteers from villages to walk back and forth between villages to bring patients and medical records to serve as a bridge between the villages and clinics,” he said.
So far, they have sites in Uganda and Malawi in Africa. They have provided cell phones to volunteers, who instead of walking more than 100 miles to carry a stack of medical records, can communicate via text messages.
“The pilot sites have yielded dramatic cost-savings for the clinics, increased patient treatment capacity and hundreds of hours of community health workers time has been saved,” he said.
His nonprofit has also provided software that serves as a two-way hub to receive text messages. An example is someone injured in a village 40 miles away from a clinic and who cannot walk to a clinic. A health worker texts the clinic that the patient cannot walk and needs emergency help. The message is automatically forwarded to a nurse who travels on a motor bike with medical supplies to the patient, he said.
Mahmud plans to travel this summer to set up more sites in Bangladesh. One of the other founders will travel through parts of Africa this summer.
The founders take a salary but, in the case of the partner traveling in Africa, only enough for airfare. “We do not intend to take salaries beyond what we need to sustain ourselves during our work,” Mahmud said.
Their nonprofit organization recently received $50,000 in grants from the Clinton Global Initiative, Microsoft and others to develop software innovations for their clinic partners and to continue to develop new sites.
The foundation recently launched a cell phone donation campaign, at hopephones.org, to convert old cell phones into ones that can be used.
The cell phone campaign is aimed at collecting the hundreds of thousands of cell phones thrown away or replaced monthly in the U.S. “People can visit the Web site, click on how many phones they can donate, print a shipping label and we will pay the shipping and send the phones to our partner The Wireless Source that collects the phones, refurbishes and resells them. For every phone we donate, we get a monetary credit and for every phone they resell, we get a portion or the profit. We take that money and buy cell phones for our sites,” said Mahmud who hasn’t decided upon a medical specialty yet but is interested in public health and infectious disease and health policy.
-- E-mail comments to kblackledge@dailyitem.com.
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Danville man helps link clinics, villages
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