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 Rubayat Khan of mDoc.
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What urgent need do you address?
Over 100 million people in Bangladesh, like 2.5 billion others around the world, live in rural areas and lack access to doctors. When people fall ill in rural Bangladesh, they visit small, local pharmacies run by “village doctors” with no medical training. These village doctors don’t charge for consultations and don’t ask patients to undergo expensive diagnostic tests, but the local people trust them. In fact, village doctors serve 70% of the rural health care market. Although the medical community and the government largely ignore them, mDoc believes these people are key to improving health care access for rural communities.
Over 100 million people in Bangladesh, like 2.5 billion others around the world, live in rural areas and lack access to doctors. Tweet This Quote
What solution do you propose?
mDoc leverages technology to provide accessible, affordable, and quality health care for underserved rural communities in Bangladesh. We do this by training one village doctor from each community to be our telemedicine assistant. When people get sick, they walk to this local provider who uses a tablet to input medical history and physical examination results. This information goes to the cloud where a doctor sitting at our headquarters hundreds of miles away accesses the information. She then decides what additional answers she needs and requests a voice or video call to ask relevant questions. With more information, the doctor types a prescription and sends it back to the village doctor. In five minutes and for only $2.50, a patient walks away with necessary medicines, advice, and referrals if needed. Over the last year, mDoc has served over 1,500 patient cases, and we are looking to rapidly scale across Bangladesh in the next few years. We believe our technology and business model can sustainably bridge the distance between doctors and patients in Bangladesh and beyond.