NYAGI Project - Executive Summary
Entity: a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity organization
Vision: A world where every pregnant mother, anywhere in the world, has access to medical providers skilled in basic prenatal ultrasound to help triage life-threatening conditions for appropriate care.
Mission: To save lives with ultrasound use in low-resource areas of the world.
Overview: Ultrasound is a powerful medical imaging tool - a visual stethoscope that is portable, immediate, and safe - but hard to learn. NYAGI Project helps to establish scalable and sustainable ultrasound education in underserved populations around the world to improve local healthcare. NYAGI experts train trainers who then teach other medical providers how to use ultrasound to identify health conditions that may need to be triaged for appropriate care.
We use an accelerated 3-step Train-The-Trainer program:
Remote ultrasound skills training via Zoom taught by ultrasound experts is flexible to the unique needs of medical providers selected by our partner organizations.
Supplement education with 7D Imaging, Inc. NAV™ software, online videos, and webinars. Modules include obstetrics, emergency medicine, orthopedic trauma, lung (COVID), cardiac and breast ultrasound. Mobile phones and/or portable tablet computers combined with the NAV™ software, serve as ‘teachers in a box’ for continued provider and patient education.
Follow-up skills assessments via image quality reviews and proficiency examinations. NYAGI trains participant trainers who, in a similar process, train others, thereby ‘passing the knowledge forward’ and empowering their region to help triage patients for higher-level care as needed.
Partnerships: To achieve enduring, meaningful impact, NYAGI partners with in-country local NGOs, foundations, and government agencies with proven track records to support, educate and empower maternal-fetal healthcare workers. NYAGI assists in-country partners to “champion” projects and to acquire funding for scaling ultrasound as a triage tool regionally and nationally.
Projects: (2016 and 2017) Nepal: NYAGI partnered with One Heart World-Wide (OHW), to teach prenatal ultrasound skills to 60 physicians and skilled birth attendant nurses working in 28 rural/remote birth centers. (2019 and 2020) Haiti: NYAGI partnered with Caris Foundation and Project Santé to teach prenatal and point-of-care ultrasound skills to 40 physicians, midwives, and nurses working in rural community health centers. (2021-2022) Nicaragua: NYAGI partnered with Rotary Club for a project to teach trainers at a nursing college in Jalapa. NYAGI also added baby resuscitation training to the curriculum. (2021-2022) Tanzania project focused on all-remote training for doctors and midwives to learn prenatal and emergency ultrasound and baby resuscitation skills. (2022) Senegal and Pakistan: possible projects.
Results: OHW data in Nepal show that each month 10-20 mothers in rural villages are referred to regional health centers for higher-level care based on ultrasound findings. Assuming these lives would otherwise have been lost, we consider those at least 10 mothers and their babies saved. In Haiti, we trained over 40 medical providers in-person and additional providers remotely during the Covid pandemic. Covid forced us to pivot to use and master remote, live, 2-way video training, which allows us to teach anywhere in the world without travel risks to our NYAGI team.
Financial Overview: NYAGI is a small and nimble organization. Our work is funded through donations, partner grants, and pro bono contributions from medical and organizational experts. Relationships with larger organizations with a shared purpose can provide resources to leverage results at scale.
Goals: NYAGI has shown it can save lives with ultrasound, especially in rural, low-resource areas of the world. Our goals are to develop partnerships with mission-aligned organizations to enhance local capacity with our partners. We strive to expand our reach to underserved populations around the world, where medical care is never guaranteed, to improve access to life-saving ultrasound.