About

We are a joint group affiliated with University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University that is committed to increasing the access to emergency health care for underprivileged populations through the use of mobile technology.

Mobilizing Health uses an SMS platform to connect villagers to licensed practitioners in the developing world.  Through this simple and cost-effective design, those who could not gain access to affordable healthcare would have the opportunity to obtain it.  Last July, we piloted with 8,000+ villagers in Rajasthan, India and connected 64 patients, preventing potential life-threatening situations that would have otherwise gone without care.

Last July, we piloted with 8 villages in Rajasthan, India and established an SMS help line, called SMS Madad. Madad has an Arabic origin, and means “help” in Hindi. When someone in the village is hurt — cut, burn, animal bite, accident — they can immediately contact our designated Village Correspondent, or VC (the village resident with the cell phone), and he or she will send an SMS to a doctor, who will respond with advice in minutes.

This reduces the amount of time villagers spend going from place to place looking for the right facility to treat their injury or illness. It furthermore gives them the knowledge how to properly recover. In turn, SMS allows doctors to be able to go on with their normal routine and still quickly offer advice when there is a villager in need.

We are returning to Rajasthan this December to start our full implementation stage with the Raven Foundation. In 2010, we will service 50 villages — 50,000 people — to a doctor for emergency situations. These villagers currently do not have easy access to free emergency medical care, and we believe this project can save thousands of lives over the course of the next few years.

For more detail on our program, we encourage you to see the Mobilizing Health Summary page.

Please support our cause! Donations are tax deductible. Contact Pooja Upadhyaya of Mobilizing Health through email or phone: poojau@berkeley.edu | 949.350.1716

Thank you!

-Mobilizing Health Team-