Overview

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At InSTEDD we envision a world where communities everywhere design and use technology to continuously improve their health, safety and development. Founded in 2006 in California’s Silicon Valley with seed funding from Google.org and the Rockefeller Foundation, InSTEDD has been working around the world to implement this vision, including the launch of innovation laboratories or iLabs in Southeast Asia and Latin America, which are fostering collaborative engineering practices and entrepreneurial innovation in those regions.

InSTEDD has a unique offering — we design and use open source technology tools to help partners enhance collaboration and improve information flow and knowledge sharing to better deliver critical services to vulnerable populations. With long term sustainability in mind, our interdisciplinary team of public health experts, scientists, and software engineers helps build local capacity to solve critical health, safety and development problems. We are committed to evaluating the impact of our programs, documenting best practices, and sharing the results of our work.

InSTEDD’s innovative approach, which facilitates collective action by local partners, is being successfully applied around the world — from pioneering efforts to integrate disease surveillance and response systems in Southeast Asia to implementation of a nationwide communications system to aid victims of the Haiti earthquake in 2010. We are a non-profit; our partners include community groups, government agencies, leading universities, private sector companies, and humanitarian organizations.

Our work is often focused on addressing life-threatening gaps in communication and knowledge sharing — at the local level our projects have ranged from implementing an appointment reminder system for HIV/AIDS patients in Cambodia to supporting maternal child health workers in Mexico in text-messaging life-saving information to their patients. At the policy level, we are advising organizations like the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on the strategic implementation of health information systems and collaboration technology ventures.

Whatever the context, all of us at InSTEDD are committed to the agile development of open-source collaboration technology tools and building local capacity to use this technology for social good.