Mamotest

WHAT IF YOUR ANNUAL MAMMOGRAM COULD SAVE SOMEONE ELSE’S LIFE?

Back in 2011, during a conversation with my father who is a doctor specialising in breast imaging diagnosis, I learned that breast cancer is the form of cancer that kills the most women.

Mamotest is a movement that’s democratising breast cancer early diagnosis in order to prevent up to 51,000 deaths per year, which would also save the healthcare system in Latin America. It’s a comprehensive solution based on telemedicine, that allows us to strategically locate state of the art mammography units in healthcare centres in underserved areas.

Women visit our centres and have a mammogram done. The mammogram is then uploaded to the cloud and read by a specialist doctor, somewhere in the world, who will send a report back in less than 24 hours. We also run cancer awareness campaigns and we push for legislation so women can have one day off of work to see the gynecologist and have their mammogram done.

FUNDING WOULD ALLOW US TO…

Funding will allow us to upscale our validated business model beyond Argentina to the rest of Latin America. Our plan is to further develop our platform to capture critical metrics in real time, to automatically distribute workloads among doctors, and to support the process of interpreting images in order to make the process even more efficient. By doing this, we’ll be democratising access to breast cancer early diagnosis.

So far, we have 15 centres in the north of Argentina, reaching 60,000 women per year and saving $15 million per year in the healthcare system. Today a woman in the province of Chaco, Argentina, can have access to the same quality of breast imaging diagnosis that a woman in Europe has.

INCREDIBLE PEOPLE INSPIRED ME

There were just a few people who inspired me to become a social entrepreneur: those very rare individuals that were ahead of their time, with the perfect combination of purpose, empathy and being business oriented. Among those special people were Dr. Jorge Gronda, a gynaecologist that works in one of the poorest provinces in the north of Argentina, who has dedicated the last 35 years to saving the lives of thousands of women from the Coya (indigenous) community. The other person was Dr. Venkataswamy, the founder of Aravind (a social impact company preventing blindness in India). He also included telemedicine and was both inspirational and a very pragmatic individual.

WHAT’S YOUR BLEND FOR SUCCESS?

Our blend for success is threefold:

1 - There is a global need: Breast cancer is the cancer that kills the most women - but it can be cured when found at an early stage. Unfortunately, vast numbers of the women in emerging markets don’t get tested.

2 - There is a worldwide trend for using AI and telemedicine to democratise access to high quality healthcare. Additionally, there is a tendency for governments to implement solutions that benefit women.

3 - It’s a comprehensive solution with a validated business model in a “worst case scenario”. Argentina has a very unstable economy that has a 50% yearly inflation rate and is constantly devaluating its currency. This scenario makes the acquisition of mammography units that need to be imported and pay in US Dollars, almost a mission impossible.