ClickDiagnostics, Inc. is a global tele-health company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. We provide a mobile technology-based infrastructure to connect community-based health-workers to remote medical specialists. We develop solutions that enable local entrepreneurs with limited medical training to serve as health-workers, providing remote consultation service to patients or gathering critical health-related data. ClickDiagnostics brings together public health, technology and entrepreneurship in a unique way.
Need and Opportunity
The developing world suffers from a severe scarcity of doctors, which is compounded by the fact that doctors are generally concentrated in urban areas, leaving the rural poor severely under-served. This often leads to exploitation by local charlatan ‘doctors’ with no medical training.
However, developing countries generally have community health-workers with limited medical training, and an abundance of young people who can be trained as health-workers. Rapid penetration of cell phones and evolution of inexpensive health gadgets further open up possibilities for local health-workers to serve as the conduit for remote consultation from doctors.
The Genesis
The concept of ClickDiagnostics, Inc. was born under the facilitation of the MIT Media Lab Director Sandy Pentland and lecturer Joost Bonsen. Through their Developmental Entrepreneurship class, groups of students from Harvard, MIT, and Stanford worked together to generate social entrepreneurial ideas that will improve the lives of over one billion people.
The ClickDiagnostics team, with combined experiences in establishing IT-for-development NGOs, developing and managing innovative IT-based solutions in health, and fostering micro-entrepreneurship, formed the idea of providing affordable first-world healthcare to rural patients using cell phones and local micro-entrepreneurs.
On May 1, 2008, ClickDiagnostics won the prestigious MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition in the Development Track. The competition consisted of over 200 teams, spanned 9 months, and involved scores of investors, business leaders, and social economic development experts in the judge panel.
