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A 2-for-1 Giving Opportunity from INSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters)

Colleagues,

Please see message I am forwarding to you below from MedTech-IQ member, Eric Rasmussen, CEO, InSTEDD. InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters) is a non-profit created three years ago to fight global health threats and natural disasters in remote and dangerous places founded by Dr. Larry Brilliant, former director of Google's philanthropic arm ... Google.org.

CC
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| December 2009


Help InSTEDD get out to more places where people are dying invisibly and needlessly

Some great reasons to celebrate the arrival of 2010...


Happy Holidays to You! And please help us with a Challenge Match!


Join us Now
There is just a day or so left to help InSTEDD meet the challenge to raise $50,000 in new donations before year end. Donate by January 1st and your gift will be doubled by our generous matching funder. Support those on the frontline of emergency response – village health workers, disaster responders, and community volunteers – with the free and open source tools they need to save lives. The better equipped they are, the safer we all are.

GeoChat, Mesh4x, Riff, and the Innovation Lab

InSTEDD is a non-profit created three years ago to fight global health threats and natural disasters in remote and dangerous places. We're using technology and education, teaching self-reliance and building capacity in some of the most difficult and vulnerable areas of the world, and we're already beginning to see our impact (1).

Three years ago our founder, Dr. Larry Brilliant, shared his vision of a world where humanitarian technology could help stop the next global pandemic before it happens. Now, with partners around the world, and a close relationship with those most at risk, we're bringing his vision to life:

1) We've established an Innovation Lab (iLab) in Cambodia, a hotspot for emerging infections, to work with Health Ministries throughout all of Southeast Asia. In that lab we're helping local software developers and infectious disease specialists design and create Early Warning tools that are now helping even the most remote and isolated areas report disease outbreaks faster than ever before, saving lives.

2) We're building free and open-source software tools to meet the needs of health and disaster workers in remote locations: GeoChat (SMS-based deep field group communication), Mesh4X (information sharing between critical systems), and Riff (a collaborative decision support tool with sophisticated analytical capabilities). We're building these tools side-by-side with partners from countries in the Global South, creating a capacity for self-reliance in those communities most at risk for emerging infections and natural disasters.

3) We're now providing free and open-source technologies for disease detection and rapid outbreak response to the Ministries of Health in Cambodia and Thailand. Now remote health workers can collaborate with each other using just a cell phone, with their reports immediately visible on a map in the Operations Centers. We have requests from other risky spots, Laos and Tajikistan, to help them as well but we don't yet have the resources to respond.

You, too, can now support InSTEDD in our grassroots-driven creation of tools that reduce the spread of emerging infections in some of the most hazardous and vulnerable areas of the world.

InSTEDD's unique approach, living with those most at risk and helping them help themselves, is already proving a powerful and effective method for stopping the spread of disease outbreaks and improving the speed of disaster responses, but it can only continue with your valuable support.

And now your contribution can have even greater value: We've been offered a Challenge Match – a donor willing to double any donations we receive by January 1st!

Please donate now to ensure community health workers and other first responders have the free and open source tools that make the difference between lives saved and lives lost. We have raised $100,000 in unrestricted funds and, with your support, we can achieve our Match goal of raising a total of $150,000 by the start of 2010.

Even a modest donation is extremely effective. With your help we will be able to:

* Train more community health workers to submit disease reports quickly and effectively from those remote locations most at risk.

* Develop new technologies to serve barely-literate health and disaster workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia.

* Implement technology tools to ensure very poor communities can be heard (and helped) in the aftermath of a natural disaster, starting with communities right here in the US.

We know you want to make sure your money is carefully spent and is doing genuine good in the world. Please know that by contributing to InSTEDD you are amplifying your gift 2-for-1 to benefit thousands of health workers and First Responders around the globe and here at home. You can also be assured that, through InSTEDD's capacity-building model, you are helping those most at risk gain the technical ability solve their own problems from this point forward.

Please contact me directly at Rasmussen@InSTEDD.org if you are interested in aiming your donation - I'd be very happy to talk it over with you.

Please click here now to donate (even a little!) and Thank You for your support!

Seasons greetings and best wishes,
Eric Rasmussen, CEO, and the InSTEDD Team


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(1) With GeoChat, the Provincial Health Teams in northern Thailand can now notify each other of a disease outbreak days earlier than they had previously. They are using InSTEDD's peer-to-peer cellphone software to increase the speed and effectiveness of their urgent outbreak reporting. We are already collecting anecdotes of disease outbreaks (like Leptospirosis in a village in October) that stayed small and contained because the reporting was fast and the Response Team effective.


One of the best parts of this project on the northern Mekong is that we did this work while simultaneously teaching, strengthening the local technical capacity to meet local needs, establishing a long-term self-reliance.

INSTEDD's GeoChat is available in the US through SMS 44911

© 2009 | InSTEDD | info@instedd.org

This email was sent by InSTEDD, 480 California Ave, Suite 104, Palo Alto, California 94306.

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