MedShare Delivers Supplies Around the Globe
Allison Shirreffs
April 11, 2008

Left: Advancing medicine: A.B. Short with MedShare International found technology that ensured countries received the right medical supplies. (Photo: Joann Vitelli )

For years, U.S. hospitals have discarded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of medical supplies they can no longer use, while each year thousands of patients in developing nations don't receive medical aid because the resources needed don't exist. Rather than bury excess supplies in a landfill, A.B. Short, who founded the Atlanta Community Food Bank in the late 1980s, decided to put such supplies into the hands of those who could use them.

When he looked into why perfectly useful medical supplies so needed elsewhere were going in the trash, Short, CEO and co-founder of MedShare International, discovered several things.

Unlike consumer goods, health-care items don't have a uniform code system or SKUs. Therefore, collecting and tracking a worthwhile inventory was a daunting task. Not to mention giving possible recipients the ability to search the inventory for what they needed.

How to ship needed goods to some of the world's most rural areas also posed a problem. While doing their due diligence, the co-founders approached a global health-care expert with local ties and engaged the services of a technology team at Georgia Tech.

Short and his co-founder, Bill Freeman, first sought the advice of Dr. William Foege, an epidemiologist who worked to eradicate smallpox. Foege, a former director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and currently a senior fellow with The Carter Center, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a distinguished professor of

international health at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health, was supportive of the MedShare concept but gave Short realistic advice. More times than not, Foege told Short, organizations dump product in developing countries regardless of whether or not those countries have asked for what they're given.

"Foege explained that if we can get them only what they need and request, then we'll alleviate problems in the developing world," says Short.

Although it's difficult to gauge exactly how many patients MedShare products have assisted in the decade since its inception, Short estimates the number at somewhere in the hundreds of thousands to more than 1 million. The organization's success -- in 2006, MedShare International distributed more than $11 million worth of medical supplies to hospitals and clinics in nearly three dozen countries -- has made it a finalist for this year's Technology Innovation Award given by TechBridge.

MedShare's success is largely due to its business model. Rather than "pushing [product] out the door because you have it," notes Short, MedShare founders developed a "pull" system where recipients ask for, and receive, what they need.

Although there was no software MedShare could buy off the shelf to log and track its unique inventory, consultants at Georgia Tech noticed that the food bank "model" closely matched MedShare's proposed model. The team at Georgia Tech contacted a company in Texas that supplied software to food banks and worked with it to customize its software to suit MedShare's needs.

Comparing the software to Amazon.com, Short explains that a doctor in rural India or the jungles of Guatemala can log in and search MedShare's inventory for everything from rubber gloves to heart monitoring equipment.

"The whole process puts the power of decision into the recipient's hands rather than in our hands," says Short. Medical teams about to make a jaunt to far-off places can visit MedShare's "Team Store" and order supplies, and the organization is working to establish an efficient way to help distant health-care facilities with the upkeep of their biomedical equipment.

Currently, MedShare's only warehouse is in Atlanta, but MedShare worked with consultants to identify other strategic areas for expansion. At the moment, the organization is establishing a West Coast location in San Francisco that will service Central America, South America and the Pacific Rim.

Patricia Robinson, an independent consultant and chair of MedShare's board of trustees, hopes to utilize the consulting services garnered from TechBridge to develop software that would be used to control a central service center and deal with a multi-warehouse situation. She'd also like to ramp up the organization's marketing efforts.

"We want to make our Web site more informative and bring what we do to life," Robinson says.