A Few Laptops...Tons of  Phones...  FrontlineSMS:Medic & You

How do you create real change in health care in the developing world? Simple: Focus on the people. A few months ago, we launched FrontlineSMS:Medic, to allow individuals around the world to have a set of effective and efficient, free and open-source mobile health tools to manage the needs of their clinics and patients. Then we took things further and started Hope Phones, so we could open-source and democratize not just the software that went into FrontlineSMS:Medic programs, but the hardware as well. Now any clinical program that wants to run FrontlineSMS:Medic can enroll in Hope Phones and fundraise their own hardware, eliminating the barrier of implementation costs altogether. Those were just the first steps, now we're taking things further with Medic Bootcamps.

What's the idea behind Medic Bootcamps? Again, it's all about focusing on the people. If 1 trains 10, and 10 trains 100, and 100 train 1000...then we're on the way to having more than just FrontlineSMS:Medic as a software package, but FrontlineSMS:Medic as a movement for democratic, appropriate, low-cost mobile technology in the developing world. And we want you to be at the center of that.

Once a month in the Bay Area, we'll be having a Medic Bootcamp, where you can get trained on the essentials of our software, our hardware, our training best practices, learn the operational costs that go into managing a FrontlineSMS:Medic system, and get on the road to setting up your clinic's own Hope Phones collection campaign. How long will it will all take? 2 hours. That's it. Bootcamps are designed to be ultra-efficient, so that in the time it takes to watch a movie or a string of sitcom reruns you can learn our system from A to Z.

And this all about training the trainers of FrontlineSMS:Medic to build a real global community around these mobile tools. So if you are an out-of-towner just passing through the Bay, or a Bay resident headed out of town or even out of the country, then perfect. We don't just want you to come, we need you to come, learn how we do what we do, and go off and teach others in your communities and around the world how to do the same. Every trainer will get at the Bootcamp the basic training materials they need to go hold their own Medic Bootcamps, wherever and whenever they wish. Again it's all about the people...

Cheers and See You Soon,

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FrontlineSMS:Medic