When a U.S. citizen needs to go to the doctor, they can be there within minutes.

For someone in a developing country, it is a different situation. With very little technological communication, and medical staff typically far away, it could even take up to two days to find out about a simple measles outbreak.

This slow pace of communication has proved a problem. But Josh Nesbit, founder of Medic Mobile, is showing that simple, yet innovative technology solutions can change the health care landscape in developing countries.

Just a few years ago, Medic Mobile started supplying $10 cellphones to citizens and community health volunteers in countries located in Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia.

The cellphones are allowing doctors and medical help to track outbreaks and provide health solutions in a much faster manner. According to Mashable, while in Malawi, Kenya, Nesbit and his team discovered they could use basic cellphones to track infectious disease 134 times faster than communication via biking and walking.

In just a few short years, Medic Mobile has been a tremendous success. With the company recently doubling its total workers to 16,000 employees, it is projecting it will be able to reach 7.5 million people by the end of 2013.

Nesbit told Mashable the idea came to him when he was out in Kenya with a community health volunteer, Dixon, who was walking 35 miles per week to deliver medical updates to patients personally.

When Nesbit checked his phone, he saw he had six bars — that’s when the idea struck him. Most people in these developing countries never see a real doctor in their life. However, 95 percent of the world population is covered by a cell signal, giving this program so much potential, according to Nesbit.

The greatest part about the whole idea is that a single cellphone can really make all the difference. By supplying communities and community health volunteers with basic cellphones and sim card applications that work on any phone in the world, you can connect community members to their health volunteers to real doctors in minutes.

Patient files can be transferred much quicker than before, and being able to find out the specific disease a person has is really half the battle. The faster doctors can do this, the faster disease and treatment information can be transferred to a patient. This solution improves the medical conditions of communities all over sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, and no medical innovation was even made.

The success of the Medic Mobile program has only driven the company further with their goal to increase the effectiveness of healthcare in developing countries. Just a few months ago, Medic Mobile released the Web app Kujua, which is being used for disease surveillance, stock monitoring and service monitoring.

With how far Medic Mobile has come, I am shocked by the simplicity behind the idea and by how much U.S. citizens take the quality of their lives for granted. The company took a product that is out of date in the United States and turned it into a revolutionary concept for sub-Saharan and Southeast Asian countries.

Today, the United States puts so much emphasis on the next big technology innovation that we often forget to look around at the rest of the world. We are creating technologies and then making them nonexistent before developing countries are even in reach of them.

But if we focused on making sure that developing countries were moving forward at a similar pace as us, it is likely that our quality of life would be better. If more countries were able to take care of themselves, support their own economy and have the resources to innovate, the United States might actually get to experience a time where the weight of the world is finally not on its shoulders.

Bram Berkowitz is a senior advertising and entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected].

Published on November 21, 2013 at 2:45 am