“A child born in a developing country is over 13 times more likely to die within the

first five years of life than a child born in an industrialized country.”

- The Millennium Development Goals Report 2008

This statistic tells a chilling tale about the vast difference between healthcare in the developed and the developing worlds. Addressing this imbalance in healthcare in a progressive and proactive fashion has been the driving force behind the conception and creation of the Mobile Infield Diagnostic Assistant, or simply MIDA. MIDA’s purpose is to assist the developing world meet its goals for improved healthcare by combining technology and development to provide free diagnostic assistance to health workers. 

MIDA aims to meet this objective by overcoming two problematic issues facing healthcare development in the developing world.  The first is the lack of adequately trained health workers, especially in rural areas.  This is primarily a problem of supply and demand.  There is a huge and growing demand for healthcare and for trained health professionals in all developing countries, but a huge shortage of supply.  Training healthcare professionals can take many years, if not decades, to educate, fund, and distribute to all underserved areas. MIDA can make an immediate impact by providing onsite diagnostic assistance to all health workers, even those with little medical training or health education.

The second issue is making the advancements in technology beneficial and sustainable in a developing world context.  The most challenging aspect of this issue is the context. The technology exists in the developed world, but directly exporting the most cutting edge electronic solutions to the developing world is unrealistic and unfeasible for numerous reasons. 

One reason is that utilizing the latest and greatest technological advancements completely ignores the developing world’s lack of supportive infrastructure. This limits many technologies to only certain areas for possible implementation. These areas tend to be urban and the most developed. 

Another reason is that it fails to factor in the financial expenditures of both installation and maintenance. Installing a system to support this modern technology will be expensive.  The maintenance will also be expensive, but face the additional obstacle of finding the necessary human capital to actually fix or repair the system if problems arise, which they almost always do. 

This is why MIDA focuses on leveraging existing structures, but using them in a new and innovative way. By keeping our technology relatively simple, i.e. SMS, it keeps the project feasible both practically and economically.  More importantly it provides fewer limitations to implementation, thereby increasing its scope and effectiveness. 

The problems with healthcare facing the developing world are grave and truly complex. They need our attention and assistance, but they require innovative, yet realistic solutions like MIDA. We thank you for visiting our site and please keep reading to find out more about how MIDA can help bridge the gap in healthcare between the developed and the developing worlds.


                                                            Sincerely,


                                                            The MIDA Team

                                                            December 2008