The Vodafone Americas Foundation and the mHealth Alliance (a coalition of the United Nations Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Vodafone Americas Foundation) announced that Sana had won the mHealth Alliance Award (valued at $50,000) and finished third in the Wireless Innovation Prize ($100,000) at the Global Philanthropy Forum on April 19, 2010. These awards recognize Sana’s new applications for wireless technology and its potential to address health challenges in low-resource settings.
“Innovations like Sana demonstrate the power of mobile health, or mHealth, to close the health information divide. We selected Sana for the mHealth Alliance Award because of its proven potential to connect remote health workers with medical professionals, supporting the delivery of quality care to the furthest reaches of wireless communications.” said David Aylward, executive director of the mHealth Alliance.
The group’s name was changed from Moca to Sana, which means “healthy” in Spanish and Italian and “hope” or “wish” in the Philippines. A spinoff from the MIT Nextlab program, Sana is a multidisciplinary group of MIT and Harvard students with a mission to revolutionize healthcare delivery in rural and undeserved areas, nationally and internationally. The group developed an innovative open-source platform that allows mobile phones to capture and send data to an electronic medical record (OpenMRS) and link community health workers with physicians for real-time decision support.
“We are driven by the belief that health care systems can be improved with low cost health information technology, but technology alone is not sufficient. To effect sustainable change, local expertise and leadership capacity must be fostered” said Dr. Leo Celi, a Sana co-founder.
To this end, Sana is developing the “mHealth Lab,” a course to be taught at MIT and disseminated freely by distance learning to partner institutions worldwide. The aim is to build a template for developing and deploying mHealth projects based on an analysis of best practice in identifying health needs, creating solutions and overcoming contextual factors that limit the impact of health information technology. The organization believes that the Sana mHealth Lab will build local leadership and skills and hence lead to more sustainable implementations of mHealth solutions.
Sana intends to advance their mission using the Vodafone Americas Foundation and mHealth Alliance seed funding and the management support of the Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society’s Global Social Benefit Incubator Program (GSBI™). Placement in the GSBI, secured through the mHealth Alliance Award, will provide access to a Silicon Valley support network and instruction on how to achieve maximum sustainability and impact. The Sana team is also excited to announce other upcoming awards. Their innovative work will be featured in a Smithsonian exhibit called “Why Design Now?” which will examine reasons why design thinking is an essential tool for solving some of today’s most urgent problems.
In addition, Sana will be receiving the Massachusetts Medical Society Information Technology award for the development of information tools that help physicians practice medicine, teach medicine, or pursue clinical research. The Smithsonian exhibit will open at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City on May 14, 2010, while the Massachusetts Medical Society award will be conferred at the Boston Harbor Hotel on May 13, 2010. More information on Sana can be found at http://sanamobile.org/ or by contacting Dr. Leo Celi.