AS AN INFANT, Frank Brady contracted spinal meningitis and was not expected to survive. A drug as yet untested on patients so young was available, and, with no other choice, Brady’s parents agreed to an experimental treatment. Penicillin saved baby Frank’s life.
“My mother always told me that God had spared me for a reason—that I was meant to do something special with my life,” Brady says. But decades passed before he found out exactly what God had in mind.
Eleven years ago, Brady was thriving as a high-level executive for General Electric France, based in Paris and flying about 100,000 miles a year for business in developing countries. That’s when a cardiologist told him he was going to have to slow down—or else. Brady listened to his doctor, and to his heart, and it told him what to do with the rest of his life.
Casting about for options, Brady and his wife, Peg, decided that they’d like somehow to help children and the families of children who were facing life-threatening diseases. In 1999 they approached St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital in Patterson, New Jersey, with an idea: treating children by using telemedicine or videoconferencing technology that would link pediatric specialists in the United States with colleagues thousands of miles away in developing countries. St. Joseph’s offered the Bradys the use of a windowless basement office near the boiler room. And so Medical Missions for Children (www.mmissions.org) was hatched.
The technology was nascent when the Bradys launched their project, but today videoconferencing technology, high-tech diagnostic tools, television screens and translators allow doctors at Medical Missions for Children (MMC) to examine, diagnose and treat a child in a remote area in real time. “The diagnostic capabilities are astounding,” says Dr. Michael Lamacchia, chairman of St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital. “Today we used a remote stethoscope with a doctor in Armenia, and we could each hear the child’s heart and lungs.”All that was just a dream when the Bradys took the elevator to their basement office and made the first of what would become thousands of phone calls and e-mail contacts. Working side by side, the couple got things going by slowly raising funds and developing partnerships with the World Bank, the United Nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development. As the program grew, Polycom, a leading videoconferencing company, provided more than $4 million worth of equipment to link hospitals overseas with U.S. health facilities. Intelsat, the world’s largest satellite service provider, agreed to donate the $800-an-hour satellite transmission time (worth about $3.9 million per year).
MMC has recruited pediatric specialists from 27 top-tier U.S. hospitals to donate their time for telemedicine sessions that help children in more than 100 countries. “It’s enormously gratifying to care for children we’ll never see face to face, but we know we’ve been able to help them,” says Lamacchia. “Those smiles we see when we say goodbye are so heartwarming.”
Today, MMC has a staff of 18 and a $12 million budget, and occupies state-of-the-art facilities at St. Joseph’s with a satellite teleport, broadcasting studio and digital network operations center. And Brady still doesn’t have a window.
One of the unexpected benefits of MMC’s videoconferencing equipment has been the ease with which physicians in different countries compare notes and discuss cases. In the beginning, Brady expected about 80 percent of the “electronic information bridge” to flow from the United States. But once the equipment was in place, the flow from his country has been about 20 percent. “We’ve got a whole group of countries that holds weekly ‘virtual grand rounds,’” he says, delighted that doctors of different nations are helping each other without depending on MMC.
The program’s first telemedicine case nearly made the Bradys question their cause. Local doctors in Panama asked for help with Yordano, a 7-year-old Panamanian boy born with severe facial deformities. “He was missing half his face,” says Brady. “When we first saw his photo, Peg and I looked at each other and said, ‘What did we get ourselves into?’”
Dr. Hillel Ephros of St. Joseph’s had rarely seen such a difficult case—the boy needed a new nose, a prosthetic eye and a titanium jaw. “He’s a kid I’ll remember the rest of my life,” says Ephros, who collaborated via satellite with Panamanian physicians and performed some of Yordano’s many operations at St. Joe’s. The boy and his mother stayed with the Bradys, who helped nurse him for months at a time. Now 14, Yordano lives a normal life and likes to admire his new face in the mirror.
“Over the years we’ve helped close to 25,000 children, but we never got to really see the results of our efforts,” says Brady. “This time [with Yordano] was different, and I thank God for the ringside seat.”
In time, Brady and his wife hope to leverage information technology and the explosion of medical knowledge to reach millions of kids by bringing new resources to healthcare providers all over the world. Given the speed of research breakthroughs, Brady believes medical information will easily double over the next five years. Physicians in developing countries, he says, often have difficulty keeping up with the latest medical advances. MMC has assembled a vast medical education library from CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes donated by the nation’s best hospitals, universities, research centers and federal agencies. Every day, an endless loop of medical lectures, demonstrations, discussions and clinical presentations is broadcast free of charge via satellite and broadband to more than 100,000 universities, hospitals and research centers around the world.
Brady, age 64, continues to wake his wife in the middle of the night with brainstorms—such as a network of volunteer health workers patterned after volunteer firefighters. Or a high-definition television station to tape original content. Or a spot on the National Institutes of Health Web site where pediatric specialists could help solve diagnostic challenges. Next on his agenda is Physicians’ Heads-Up Network, which will allow medical professionals around the world to download tutorials on new drugs and treatments.
“We want to be the iTunes of medical knowledge,” says Brady. “Any doctor, anytime, anywhere, on any device—a cellphone, PDA, iPod or computer—can access the latest information free of charge.”
As Medical Missions for Children has grown, the world has noticed: The charity has won accolades from the Contact Center World, the World Tech Museum and the Johnson & Johnson Foundation. Brady was a finalist for Civic Ventures’ $100,000 Purpose Prize, honoring social innovators age 60 or older. “Frank is a visionary—he’s very bright and well-connected,” says Ephros, Yordano’s surgeon. “Once he realized how big this could get, his passion just grew, and his enthusiasm rubs off on you.”
So does Frank Brady think he has lived up to his mother’s prophecy? “All the time I was working for GE and running around the world, I wasn’t sure,” he says. “This time, I think so.”
Elizabeth Pope (www.elizabethpope.com), based in Portland, Maine, covers health, fitness, retirement and lifestyle topics for national publications.
