Beeline Reader
To celebrate the New Year, doctHERS wants to introduce you to three amazing women in Pakistan:
Meet Rabia. She’s a 24-year-old who trained as a hospital nurse. She couldn’t find a nursing job and became a community worker instead, barely making a living wage at $5 per day.
Meet Sonia. She’s a 20-year-old who works in a factory that produces world-class soccer balls but does not provide any on-site health care. To access health care, Sonia must take a day off and lose her full daily wage.
Meet Nisha. She’s a 25-year-old recent medical school graduate. The good news for Nisha: two-thirds of all doctors in Pakistan are women according to doctHERs. The bad news: only a quarter of them currently practice medicine largely due to sociocultural barriers.
This exclusion of women from the workforce has resulted in a significant loss of human potential and human life in Pakistan, where a majority of the population lacks access to quality, affordable health care.
This is where doctHERs steps in, working to match the underutilized capacity of health care providers to the unmet needs of health care consumers.
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Here’s how doctHERs works:
doctHERS equips female health care providers -- like Rabia -- with tablets and smartphones and deploys them in factories and offices. With this, they are able to connect health care consumers -- like Sonia -- to remotely-located female doctors -- like Nisha -- via video consultations on a proprietary telemedicine platform.
These health workers have also been trained to perform diagnostic and interventional procedures, including ultrasound and fetal heart rate monitoring.
“I’d like to welcome you to join us on this journey as we use technology to connect women to their true potential.” —Dr. Asher Hasan, Founder of doctHERs
By the time they pitched at the Solve Challenge Finals in September, doctHERS had completed more than 25,000 paid video consultations and helped 150 female doctors enter the health workforce while delivering health care to factory workers.
Here’s what next:
doctHERs is looking to fast-track their path to global scale in both emerging and mature markets. Their goal is to enroll an additional 15 million people in the next five years while reintegrating 5,000 more female doctors into the health workforce. If you have a workforce looking for affordable connection to health care providers, check them out.
Ring in 2018 with doctHERs by watching Dr. Asher Hasan pitch at the Solve Challenge Finals before becoming a Solver in the Women and Technology Challenge:
Read the solution application for doctHERs. Interested in partnering with them as they scale for global impact? Solve wants to hear from you. Reach out at solve@mit.edu.
Dr. Asher Hasan pitches doctHERs at the Solve Challenge Finals in the Women and Technology Challenge, September 17, 2017. (Photo by Samuel Stuart / MIT Solve)
