Architecting the future of Sana

Abstract

Sana is a 6-year old MIT-affiliated volunteer-run organization dedicated to tackling the issue of global health disparities through fostering multidisciplinary collaborations between different stakeholders in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs). Sana engages in several activities such as: " Running a spring MIT course on health informatics * Collaborating on mobile health projects with partners worldwide " Organizing hackathon events held worldwide " Developing a software telemedicine platform. The group however is struggling to juggle all these projects with the limited staff and funding it has. This thesis evaluates the Sana organization, its associated stakeholders and ecosytem using the ARIES framework to make recommendations on what activities Sana should pursue in the future and what concomitant changes are required to execute and scale those activies sustainability over the long term. The main lesson of this thesis is that, instead of focusing on growing a sparse worldwide network of collaborators, Sana should focus its efforts on growing regional networks of such collaborators. The proffered architecture for a such a network is a consortium of regional universities. This consortium would have a mandate of supporting the launch of local mHealth initiatives and more importantly, the integration of these initatives into local health systems. Only through such concerted efforts to bolster health-related research capacities in LMICs will these countries be able to address the large health inequities in their populations.