About Medical Missions for Children
MMC is a medically focused nonprofit organization located on the campus of St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital in Paterson, NJ. Telemedicine is at the heart of MMC’s mission of “transferring medical knowledge from those who have it to those who need”. Its unique offering is the technology platform called the Global Telemedicine and Teaching Network (GTTN) which supports two key functions – the diagnosis and treatment of critically ill children and the education of the global healthcare community.
“The world in which we live is in the midst of a silent revolution. Scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs are now occurring more rapidly than ever thought humanly possible and experts from such institutions as the National Institutes of Health are forecasting that medical knowledge will double within the next five years”
Frank Brady President,
Medical Missions for Children
Medical Disparities
Particularly disturbing to this doting father of two, was how parents would bring their sick child to a hospital where the doctors would exhaust their training and the medical information available to them. Too often the child would be warehoused until he or she died without ever being diagnosed, or by being diagnosed incorrectly. When he was forced to retire due to a heart condition, Frank and his wife Peg decided to expand on their regular volunteer activities to create their own charity, Medical Missions for Children, Inc. (MMC).
“The world in which we live is in the midst of a silent revolution. Scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs are now occurring more rapidly than ever thought humanly possible and experts from such institutions as the National Institutes of Health are forecasting that medical knowledge will double within the next five years” says Frank Brady. The current global healthcare disparities will only worsen as the latest medical advances are brought into practice in the developed world. MMC’s goal is to help the rest of the world improve their quality of care by maximizing the effect of this increase in knowledge and to develop innovative ways to transfer information about best practices from its point of origin to the front lines of medicine. MMC has created innovative and effective usages of telemedicine to help alleviate profound global healthcare disparities. According to Mr. Brady, “The healthcare disparities around the world are a sad reality and this must be changed. Whether or not a patient dies from a disease should not depend on the country in which he or she lives.”
MMC’s telemedical consultations are made possible through a wealth of collaborative partnerships with visionary organizations such as AMD Global Telemedicine, St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center and Polycom. MMC’s Telemedicine Outreach Program (TOP) is a cost efficient way for healthcare professionals to consult on unique cases where one doctor may have more specialized training and can discuss a case more thoroughly than a general practitioner. A true revolution in advancing telemedicine came about with the use of AMD Global Telemedicine instrumentation.
This equipment takes a medical consultation from speculation, to diagnosis and treatment. Remote diagnostic instruments such as the Telephonic Stethoscope allow a doctor in the US to accurately assess the auscultation of a child’s heart even though they are thousands of miles apart.
Through the support of the US medical community, and in particular, the medical staff of 650 to 700 specialists and subspecialists located at 27 of the US and Europe’s finest medical centers, MMC has developed a knowledge transfer bridge that connects physicians and other medical professionals from underserved communities the world over. These medical professionals are now able to access the resources they need to deliver the best care possible to their patient population. Innovation lies at the heart of nearly every aspect of MMC’s projects, from the design and development of an online user experience that transcends geographic and cultural boundaries, to the implementation of a technology-based medical education environment that is of benefit to both provider and governing body.
MMC’s partnership with AMD Global Telemedicine has brought a new level of care to patients in over 108 countries in the world. In particular, this partnership helped to create access to quality healthcare in Armenia, included the orchestration of a pilot program targeted at improving Armenia’s pediatric primary healthcare system.
Working in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and a group of pediatric specialist from the U.S., MMC developed a series of “well-child /sick-child visit” practice guidelines, as well as a series of video based pediatric Continuing Medical Education (CME) programs that are accessible online from anywhere in the world.
“Medical Missions for Children does truly worthy work and much of this work is done with the aid of telemedicine,” said Steven Normandin, president of AMD Global Telemedicine. “MMC has created an effective and vital network that uses telemedicine to help critically ill children all over the world.”
MMC’s next partnership with AMD Global Telemedicine will be to bring US-trained pediatric specialists and subspecialist to the National Pediatric Cancer Institute of Morocco located in Casablanca, Africa, which will be MMC’s 109th country of service.
