FrontlineSMS: Medic - How cellphones will mediate the next revolution in healthcare in the developing world

Lucky Gunasekara & Nadim Mahmud
Stanford Medical School

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 11:00am
Engr IV Room 57-124

Bio
Lucky Gunasekara is a B.A. graduate from Cornell University in Neurobiology and Genetics. Following his time at Cornell, he spent two years living in Japan as a Fulbright Fellow studying public health in Kobe, and as a technology consultant for web media and ICT corporations in Tokyo. He is currently pursuing his M.D at Stanford University, School of Medicine where he researches ICT for healthcare applications in developing countries, specifically on improving outcomes for DOTS Tuberculosis and HAART HIVI/AIDS clinical programs. As the head of Global Clinical Research and Development for FrontlineSMS: Medic, he is currently coordinating the efforts of 4 clinical pilot sites providing feedback to Medic's software developer community, and is developing partnerships to expand to an additional 11 by the end of 2010. He plans on pursuing an M.S. in Computer Science during his time at Stanford, and upon graduation pursuing a residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Infectious Diseases. He currently lives in Palo Alto and Oslo, Norway, and can be reached at lucky@medic.frontlinesms.com.

Nadim Mahmud is a B.S./M.S. graduate from Yale University in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He has a vested interest in public health and has spent time working abroad primarily in Bangladesh. Most of his time was spent at the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) working on reducing cholera and other major disease incidence. His focus was on pediatric outcomes monitoring and improvement- breastfeeding rates, counseling, completion of childhood vaccination series, etc. He is connected with ICDDRB, BRAC, and Grameen phones and sees great potential for cell phones bringing mobile healthcare to the Bangladeshi populace.