Dr. Vanessa Kerry knew handheld ultrasound devices would be a perfect tool for training health professionals in sub-Saharan Africa. So the CEO of SEED, a Boston-based global health nonprofit, reached out to GE Healthcare, the makers of the device.



What Kerry didn’t realize was that her inquiries would lead her to another Boston-based doctor/innovator, David Barash. Barash is the chief medical officer of the GE Foundation and, one day a week, an emergency medicine doctor at Emerson Hospital in Concord. Kerry, along with her work at SEED, acts as the associate director of partnerships for the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health and spends one week per month as a critical care physician at MGH.

The two have teamed up to get the ultrasound device, called Vscan, into the hands of American volunteers and the local health care workers they are training in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. The project, Barash said, turned out to be in the GE Foundation’s sweet spot of boosting the number and capabilities of health care workers, particularly in maternal and child health.

“There is an extraordinary need,” Barash said. “For instance, in one county in Kenya there are no anesthesiologists, and between one and five mothers die each day because of it.”

The Vscan devices, about the size of a large smartphone, have a variety of routine and emergency applications, including monitoring a growing fetus, diagnosing heart failure, and checking a trauma victim for abdominal bleeding.

The devices have only been deployed to nine of the 11 training sites spread across the three countries. In a few sites, they are the only diagnostic scanning tools available.

“In other sites, there may be a CT scan, but it’s not available to all patients because it’s so costly and uses so much electricity,” Kerry said.

Neither side was willing to disclose the size of the donation from the GE Foundation, which included a grant for the pilot study as well as the devices themselves. The GE Foundation has given more than $100 million to support health projects in 15 countries since 2004, Barash said.

SEED, which launched in 2012, works with the Peace Corps to provide training programs for the program’s volunteer doctors and nurses. The nonprofit receives federal funding from PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) as well as private donations from corporations, foundations, and individuals.

Kerry said that SEED, which has a paid staff of eight, expects to have a total budget of less than $3 million next year. About half of that budget goes towards loan repayments for the volunteer physicians and nurses who typically spend one year in Africa, undergoing training, before they begin training local workers.

SEED plans to measure the success of the newly-launched project by the amount of knowledge that is transferred to local health workers. Eventually, the non-profit expects to measure the return on investment by the improvement in health outcomes at the nine training sites.