Josh Nesbit was a 19 year old, pre-med undergrad a Stanford. He went on a trip to rural Malawi in southeastern Africa and was amazed when he observed patients walking up to 100 miles to see a doctor and health workers walking 30 miles to hand deliver reports. He also observed that he got better cellphone reception in a remote village in Malawi than he did in suburban California. While these two observations may seem completely unrelated, Josh was able to combine them into a service that has helped hundreds of thousands of people in 21 different countries.
Medic Mobile is a non-profit organization that gives people living in a community cheap cell phones that allow them to connect to health centers that may be up to 100 miles away. It also has tools that allow health care workers to transmit medical records and explain patient’s symptoms using text messages. Medic Mobile focuses on antenatal care, childhood immunization, disease surveillance, and drug stock monitoring. It helps to remind women of prenatal care visits and ensure safe delivery in facilities with skilled birth attendants, it hopes to register every infant to remind them of immunizations, and it allows people report symptoms to a clinic.
By addressing a deep need in communication within the healthcare system with a simple solution, Josh was able to help countless people’s lives. As entrepreneurs, we can follow his example of not being afraid to address a huge problem and being willing to find new ways of doing so.
It’s amazing the connection he was able to make between health centers and cell reception! After talking about hunches and networking in class, it is amazing to see that it can happen anywhere at anytime.
Josh has hit on a great concept that could even penetrate the United States market as people continually forget to take medication, miss doctor appointments and have questions about child birth.
This is really interesting, because I believe that similar products actually have already been created in the United States market through apps. You can find apps to remind you to take medications, go to doctor appointments, etc. but I never would have thought to introduce that to a third world country. Generally when people want to help people living in these communities they focus on the most basic, low-tech things, like building a well or delivering food, but this is relatively high-tech, and very much a need in these communities.
I think it’s amazing to see how this 19 year old can see this pain in different parts of the world and be able to respond to it in such a positive way. Josh saw these two problems and incorporated them both into one solution: free cell phones that can transmit medial records across hundreds of miles. Seeing the huge amount of people Josh has helped with his brilliant idea is truly inspiring and I think should give us all the motivation to change the world in our own way.