Colorado screening newborn babies for spinal muscular atrophy

Project ECHO - driven by a single doctor with a cause - pulled together a team of specialists to develop a model that combines technology with collaborative care and careful patient tracking to help cure for diseases spread to patients around the world through community healthcare agents, as opposed to only specialty centers. This kind of "disruptive innovation" is effectively working to demonopolize health care knowledge and access, and lends to a health system capable of meeting today’s soaring demands for care.

Children coming from abusive households are often reluctant to discuss their past experiences. A Mexican foundation is using animated characters to help abused and ill children speak about their lives.

A nutrient powder can save anemic children, but the people who could benefit are distrustful. Having local mothers distribute the supplement was successful in Bangladesh.

In light of a study published in BMC Medicine, authors Nancy Fullman and Alexandra Wollum take a deeper dive into Nigeria’s gains against polio and what they could mean for the country’s routine vaccine systems.

PrePex, a new nonsurgical circumcision tool, could revolutionize the prevention of H.I.V. and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Cheap and easy to assemble, the device has proven successful in several randomized trials.

The Jaipur Limb organization based in India has developed prostheses at low cost, and services are free for the poor. The organization’s efforts have recently spread to other countries with impoverished people. Jaipur Limb reaches patients through branch clinics, traveling workshops, and limb camps in cities around the world.

A prosthetist from Texas visiting Jaipur Limb workshops in Honduras saw problems with their low-cost prosthetics - the issue wasn't the design of the leg, but the technicians at the Honduras workshops were people completely new to prosthetics who were given just eight weeks of training. Thanks to his research, Jaipur established a research and development unit to improve the limb.

Being poor can make you sick because of where you work, live and eat. Medical-legal partnerships, in hospitals U.S. cities, are attacking these social determinants through legal aid to the poor, often class-action lawsuits.

In the developing world, intestinal worms stunt physical and mental growth, drain energy, and can inhibit school work for children. Deworm the World is a global campaign that lobbied the Delhi government to regularly distribute deworming pills to school children. The benefits decrease student absenteeism and increase cost-saving measures.

Child First is a program in Connecticut, where staff members deliver home-based parent guidance and child-parent psychotherapy to help prevent the detrimental physical and mental effects of toxic stress on children. The engagement is guided by an evidence-based methodology called Child-Parent Psychotherapy, which is grounded in collaborative problem solving.