NYAGI Project - Executive Summary

Entity

NYAGI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity organization. NYAGI is also an acronym for the mother or child living in a remote village who desperately needs life-saving diagnostic medical imaging. [Now You Are the Group’s Interest]

Mission

To save lives with ultrasound scans in low-resource areas of the world.

Vision

A world where every pregnant mother, anywhere in the world, has access to medical providers skilled in basic prenatal ultrasound to help identify and refer life-threatening conditions for appropriate care.

Overview

Ultrasound is a powerful medical imaging tool, a portable, immediate, and safe visual stethoscope that can save lives but is hard to learn. The NYAGI Project helps establish scalable, sustainable ultrasound education in underserved populations worldwide to improve local healthcare. NYAGI experts train trainers, who then teach other medical providers to use ultrasound to identify health conditions that may need triage for appropriate care.

We use an accelerated 3-step Train-The-Trainer program:

  1. Remote ultrasound skills training via Zoom, taught by ultrasound experts, is flexible to the unique needs of medical providers selected by our partner organizations.

  2. Supplement education with our partner, 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 NAV™ software, serve as ‘teachers in a box’ for ongoing provider and patient education.

  3. 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 helps in-country partners “champion” projects and secure funding to scale ultrasound as a triage tool regionally and nationally.

Projects

  • (2016-2017) 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.

  • (2019-2020) 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 community health centers. COVID-19 and Haitian politics limited our ability to scale skills training for a few years (see below).

  • (2021-2022) Nicaragua: NYAGI partnered with the Rotary Club to remotely teach trainers at a nursing college in Jalapa. NYAGI also added baby resuscitation training to the curriculum. Nicaraguan politics limited our ability to scale.

  • (2021-2022) Tanzania: NYAGI Project focused on fully remote training for doctors and midwives in prenatal and emergency ultrasound and baby resuscitation skills. The in-country Master Trainers continue to teach others. The Tanzanian government is now working to scale ultrasound training nationally, especially into the rural areas.

  • (2023-2024) Somaliland: NYAGI partnered with DoTerra at the Edna Adan Hospital in Hargeisa. NYAGI worked with a team of physicians and midwives to master our Triage OUT™ program, equipping them to identify at-risk pregnancies and advise mothers on follow-up care. They continue working with NYAGI to scale education to more rural clinics.

  • (2024-2025) Rwanda / Zambia: NYAGI partnered with Rotary Club to provide remote ultrasound training for pilot projects to bring prenatal ultrasound to several regions.

  • (2025-2026) Cambodia: NYAGI trained physicians and midwives in the Triage OUT™ model. The in-country “Master Trainers” are now scaling skills training across Cambodia's provinces.

  • (2026-2027) Haiti: In partnership with Rotary, NYAGI is now focusing on teaching Triage OUT™ ultrasound skills to 25 clinics, mostly in rural areas of Haiti.

  • (June 2027) We hope to present our results at the annual Rotary International Convention in Barcelona, Spain.

Results

Data from several of our projects have been limited, mostly due to geopolitical factors. Nepal shows 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. Ultrasound has now scaled to six provinces in Nepal.

An unforeseen benefit: Our partners report that introducing ultrasound services to rural clinics attracts mothers to seek prenatal care that otherwise may not happen. This creates opportunities for health workers to provide education and other services.

COVID-19: The pandemic forced us to pivot to remote, live, two-way video training. This “Zoom” teaching lets us work worldwide, efficiently and flexibly, without putting our NYAGI team at risk. We now offer ultrasound educational webinars globally almost weekly.

We are also working closely with 7D Imaging, an educational software company, to develop other ultrasound skills modules for breast cancer identification, pediatric emergencies, and other life-threatening medical conditions.

Financial Overview

NYAGI is a small, nimble organization. We fund our work through donations, partner grants, and pro bono contributions from medical and organizational experts. Relationships with larger organizations that share our purpose can provide resources to help scale our Triage OUT™ program globally.

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 strengthen local capacity. We strive to expand our reach to underserved populations worldwide, where medical care is never guaranteed, to improve access to life-saving ultrasound.