On an otherwise reasonable evening in July, over 600 people packed an auditorium in Boulder, Colorado, for the culmination of the 2015 Unreasonable Institute. They came to watch 12 ventures take the stage and present their solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges.
The entrepreneur in this video is Michael Lwin of Koe Koe Tech.
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What urgent need do you address?
Health care is largely underdeveloped in Myanmar. Within a population of 55 million people, eight children die every hour, 18 million suffer from diabetes/hypertension, and 32 million suffer from infectious diseases—problems that most of us don’t have to deal with in the United States. Hospitals and labs lack modern infrastructure. Medical records are written by hand, leaving multiple opportunities for error. In most cases, records are not written at all. People in Myanmar can’t receive the kind of information people in the West take for granted. Health care is broken, and we’re going to fix it.
What solution do you propose?
In 2012, Myanmar opened up to the world, and we now have the opportunity to improve access to quality health care. Tweet This Quote
In 2012, Myanmar opened up to the world, and we now have the opportunity to improve access to quality health care. Koe Koe Tech is the first mobile health app in Myanmar that sends messages to users’ phones with information on 32 health categories, including maternal and child health. It also includes a doctor locator with over 1,500 certified doctors. The app allows you to set up appointments with doctors, community health workers, and midwives as well as order higher quality medicines delivered to your door by NGO affiliated sales agents. The major telecommunication networks launched in Myanmar just last September, but we already have over 7,000 users. We have 15 employees—14 from Myanmar, with half of our staff being women and one-third Muslim—and we offer onsite training in computer science. Our goal is to scale beyond Myanmar, improving access to quality health care across the developing world.