BY ALLISON KOZICHAROW; EDITED BY BERNICE BORN
Opening up access to its materials for millions more people, WiRED International just took a major technological leap forward. Its innovative Health Module Access Program (HealthMAP) can now deliver free health education training material to underserved communities in the world’s most distant locations, many of which have limited or no online access.
HealthMAP will enable clinicians, healthcare workers, medical schools and members of the general public to select and download health education modules from WiRED’s Health Learning Center. They can install these modules on their computers and create their own customized libraries for personal study and for presentations to community groups that lack online capability. Also, HealthMAP will launch WiRED’s global outreach effort to make modules available to nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health ministries and other institutions that address community health matters.
Interview with Christopher Spirito
HealthMAP was designed and developed by WiRED International Board Member Christopher Spirito. His daughter, WiRED Staff Writer Olivia Spirito, talked with Chris to find out how he started working with WiRED and what his vision is for this new program.
Read Olivia's interview with Chris here.
HealthMAP is the brainchild of WiRED Board Member and programmer analyst, Christopher Spirito (see interview), who built the application from scratch. He explained, “This new program runs on the Windows and Macintosh systems to sync to our server and view our entire e-library of 400+ available modules. Users can then select the modules that they are most interested in, and, with the click of a button, download them automatically. HealthMAP is a tremendous step for WiRED.”
About 85 percent of the communities WiRED serves have only intermittent Internet access, and an even higher percentage cannot access the Net in locations where health workers conduct group training, such as in remote parts of the Amazon, in the mountains of Eurasia and in the slums and faraway regions of Africa. HealthMAP is the bridge that can deliver WiRED training to offline communities in remote regions.
WiRED Director Gary Selnow, Ph.D., said, “Bridging the gap of that last mile — the distance between the last Internet connection and the target population — has always been a challenge for us, as it is for many health educators. This powerful new HealthMAP program will give us the capacity to deliver a wealth of medical and health training programs to people in off-the-grid regions, people in greatest need of a fundamental understanding of critical health issues, including prevention, signs and symptoms identification and methods of treatment. Our tests have been remarkably encouraging; we look forward to using this tool to advance our organizational mission to bring health education, free of charge, to underserved communities around the world.”
Watch WiRED’s HealthMAP Animation for an engaging step-by-step visual guide on how to download this program.
HealthMAP FAQs
How to Download the HealthMAP Software
It’s fast and easy to create your own health education e-library!
1. Click this Web Address: http://wiredinternational.org/WiREDHealthMAP.html
2. Read through the instructions, then click on either the symbol or the download button.
3. Following the instructions will place the HealthMAP program on your computer and allow you to download any of WiRED’s health education modules safely and for free.