MIT open-source phone project wins first mHealth Alliance Award

We're big fans of innovative applications of simple technology to address complex health problems in areas short on resources, so we're excited to hear that a project developed at MIT has won $150,000 in prize money for its work on an open-source software platform that enables health workers to capture and transmit EMR data on mobile phones and connect remote workers to physicians for clinical decision support.

The project, originally known as MocaMobile and recently renamed Sana, captured third place--worth $100,000--in the second-annual Wireless Innovation Project competition from the Vodafone Americas Foundation and also won the first-ever mHealth Alliance Award. The latter, a joint effort of the United Nations Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Vodafone Foundation, comes with $50,000 in benefits, including an invitation to Santa Clara (Calif.) University's Center for Science, Technology and Society's Global Social Benefit Incubator Program.

"Innovations like Sana demonstrate the power of mobile health, or mHealth, to close the health information divide," mHealth Alliance Executive Director David Aylward said in a statement released at last week's Global Philanthropy Forum Conference in Redwood City, Calif. "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," he explained.

For more information:
- read this Vodafone Americas/UN Foundation press release
- see the MocaMobile website

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