Finding Organ Donors Concealed in Plain Sight

In the past, people in poor countries who became blind due to cataracts often had no hope of improvement because of the high costs of treatment. Nepalese ophthalmologist, Sanduk Ruit, perfected a cheap and effective cataract removal technique which allows his patients to see again.

If you've got a life-threatening medical condition, your first call might not be to an economist. But Alvin Roth used a theory about matching markets to help connect kidney patients and donors.

Organ donation waiting lists can often hold wait times of months or even years. Thousands of lives could be saved with better ways to reach to the millions of Americans willing to donate an organ.

The typical surgery for hydrocephalus, a brain swelling disease, often leads to infection. Medical constraints in Uganda inspired a neurosurgeon to create a safer and more effective surgery which is now used in Uganda and the U.S.

In Zambia, the need for surgery is just as common as in the United States - doctors, however, are rare. So Zambia is training clinical officers – with no medical degrees – to do C-sections and hernia repairs.

An Oklahoma surgery center made news by posting its prices online – a revolutionary idea in an industry where consumers normally are buying blind. This is a big reason health care costs so much, but recent months have seen great advances in transparency.

Hepatitis C is a deadly disease that has yet to be eradicated in the United States (and worldwide). Organizations in El Paso and across the country are working to get people tested and treated for the virus.

Undergoing surgery is a stress-inducing prospect for anyone, but children are especially vulnerable to anxiety prior to operations. To avoid using risky anti-anxiety medications on young patients, two anesthesiologists at the Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford have developed creative techniques to distract children from their forthcoming surgeries. They use toys and a unique low-cost video projection system called BERT-Bedside Entertainment Theater.

Medical professionals say that there is a shortage of organs available for patients awaiting transplants. The first step towards the solution involves increasing awareness of organ donation as a viable and compassionate option. In 2012, the social media platform Facebook collaborated with surgeons to create the Organ Donor option—and, one year later, the number of organ donors increased five times.

In Syria, medical personnel are at risk of death as hospitals are frequent targets of bombing. With few medical specialists treating an assortment of injuries and diseases under the most dangerous circumstances, doctors began an underground network. This network installs cameras in hospital rooms to send pictures over mobile media to doctors abroad, doctors working on-site change their names, and animal waste powers the operations.