For the third year, Impact Ventures by J&J Foundation has collaborated with MIT Solve to help scale world-changing solutions addressing intractable global health equity challenges.
MIT Solve’s prize funding was announced at the Solve Challenge Finals in New York City during the recent United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week. 2024 prize funding includes the Health Equity Innovation Award supported by Johnson & Johnson Foundation ($100,000) as part of our larger commitment as the inaugural Global Health Equity Anchor Supporter.
This year’s award went to six teams who participated in the Global Health Equity Challenge which asked: How can we use technology to make good health and access to quality care more equitable for all?
As in previous years, the groundbreaking innovations of the 2024 Solver Class hold the promise of addressing critical health equity issues around the world. At Impact Ventures, we know that entrepreneurs need more than just funding, especially in a company’s early years, when they are rapidly evolving and adapting their business model, and building new teams and organizational capabilities. We are committed to advancing health equity and fostering entrepreneurship through programs like MIT Solve to champion these transformative solutions and leaders that have the potential to reshape our world for the better.
MediBot – Singapore
Solution: MediBot is an AI clinical decision support chatbot that supports primary care providers in Timor Leste.
Despite an increase in the number of healthcare professionals, the quality of primary care in Timor-Leste remains suboptimal primarily due to limited access to clinical oversight, supportive supervision, or continuous professional development opportunities for the health workforce. A key aspect of this challenge is the isolation of these healthcare workers from the essential clinical guidance needed for quality patient care.
MediBot is a clinical decision support AI chatbot that enables primary care providers (doctors and nurses) in Timor Leste to query in their native language Tetun for medical decision support. To facilitate easy access, the bot is integrated with Telegram and Whatsapp - communication channels widely used by physicians in Timor Leste. This hyper local AI bot is trained on nationally approved clinical guidelines, which helps ensure that its recommendations are relevant and specific to the local context of disease patterns, available treatments, and healthcare infrastructure.
AmarDoctor - Bangladesh
Solution: Digital health platform featuring human-centric AI for equitable primary care access, designed to tackle health inequality.
Bangladesh's primary healthcare infrastructure faces significant challenges due to a shortage of medical professionals. Due to these access inequalities, unaddressed health issues often escalate into emergencies, pushing 6 million people into poverty annually due to out-of-pocket (OOP) emergency medical expenses.
AmarDoctor, an innovative AI-powered digital health application, simplifies the management of virtual clinics, enabling them to conduct patient consultations from anywhere. By incorporating innovative AI tools such as voice-interactive triaging, appropriate doctor suggestions, and personalized health advice, it bridges the digital literacy gap, enabling primary care access for millions who have historically been deprived of regular access to primary care. Moreover, AmarDoctor introduces personalized health education, adjusted for the patient’s educational level, filling a significant gap in the current dissemination of health information and ensuring patients receive clear guidance.
NiADA - United States
Solution: NiADA is a non-invasive, point-of-care, real-time solution that uses Artificial Intelligence to detect and monitor anemia using a smartphone app.
Globally, 2+ billion people suffer from anemia, a dangerous condition of low hemoglobin level in blood particularly prevalent among reproductive age women and young children. There are no specific symptoms for anemia, and if undetected for long enough, anemia often becomes fatal. Currently, there is no accessible, easy, affordable and non-invasive way to monitor hemoglobin level regularly at home or at the point of care.
NiADA (Non-invasive Anemia Detection with AI) is a smartphone app that analyzes eyelid images to estimate and display hemoglobin level on the screen in real-time that is integration ready for other telemedicine and remote monitoring app and websites. NiADA helps users and their healthcare providers/administrators to be able to test for anemia regularly and track it for appropriate intervention. As an integrated solution for both screening and monitoring, NiADA is created for public health administrators for anemia surveillance and can scale globally with ease at a lowcost .
SAANS – India
Solution: Portable infrastructure-independent neonatal CPAP system which universalizes access to non-invasive breathing support for the neonatal and pediatrics.
More than 1 million babies die every year, less than 28 days after birth, due to a lack of breathing support. Effective treatment of asphyxia and respiratory distress, at the point of birth, has the potential to drastically reduce neonatal and infant mortality. However, many births in India happen in low-resource settings characterized by a lack of resources like electricity and trained nurses and doctors.
Saans is a novel neonatal breathing support solution designed for Indian and other emerging economies. This low-skill, infrastructure-independent device can offer multiple therapies through a single device making it effective even in infrastructure and caregiver challenged low-resource settings. By replacing multiple product categories, Saans device expands access to non-invasive breathing support and enables breathing support with much more basic requirements.
OpenFlexure Microscope - United Kingdom
Solution: A locally manufactured high performance digital microscope and slide scanner for medical diagnostics.
Millions of people die each year in low and middle income countries from conditions, from cancer to malaria, that can be diagnosed by microscopy. Access to diagnostics is a major health inequality. Without sufficient diagnostic capacity, deadly conditions go undiagnosed until it is too late to save patients' lives.
The OpenFlexure Microscope combines readily available components with custom 3D printed parts, to provide a high performance and robust diagnostic that is easy to manufacture and maintain locally in the Global South. The entirely open design allows for both robust and auditable quality management and readily provides the information for any manufacturer to verify the design, and to translate it for manufacturing appropriate for their context. Local production builds crucial capacity in regions where diagnostics are unavailable.
ThriveLink - United States
Solution: ThriveLink builds telephonic AI enrollment agents who empower families to verbally enroll into social programs with no internet or reading required.
Families across the globe continue to struggle unnecessarily because they are not able to overcome administrative hurdles to social resources like food, housing, healthcare, and citizenship. In the US alone, more than $90 billion in resources for low-income families go unaccessed every year because families are not able to complete the paperwork or online applications. Numerous factors, including Internet access, reading and comprehension, and stigma contribute to this problem.
ThriveLink, is dedicated to serving individuals facing reading barriers, a population often overlooked in accessing essential programs. Developed based on feedback from Medicaid beneficiaries and community health doctors in rural parts of the U.S., ThriveLink builds telephonic AI enrollment agents that empower families to verbally enroll in social programs with no internet or reading required. By replacing apps and websites, ThriveLink aims to make it easy for families to simply verbalize their answers to application questions over the phone. By demonstrating the effectiveness of voice-activated, language-inclusive platforms in improving healthcare access and reducing administrative burdens, ThriveLink can help overcome barriers to enrollment in healthcare programs .
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Congratulations to the 2024 winners!
We’re proud to work with MIT Solve and champion the incredible work Solver teams are doing across the globe, which is bringing us that much closer to making our aspirations of a world without health inequities a reality.