Our History
In early 2003, founder Michael Maltese traveled to Malawi, where he visited the College of Medicine (COM), Malawi's only medical school. In a country of approximately 12 million, there were only 252 registered physicians. Moreover, only half were trained in Malawi. Dr. Robin Broadhead, principal of the medical school, invited Maltese to audit the state of the college's IT resources, during which he noticed that donated computers were not being fully utilized and that outdated textbooks were used in course instruction.
Seeing the opportunity to update the informational resources at COM, Maltese began to advocate on behalf of COM. In June 2003, Maltese successfully negotiated with Oxford University to offer their distance education program in immunology for free to COM's chief of epidemiology, which enabled him to teach his students using the most current research on the diagnosis and treatment of tropical diseases. This deal was brokered through email over the course of several weeks, which led Maltese to realize that it is possible to persuade major universities to share educational resources with needy medical schools in developing countries. Moreover, it could be done cheaply and through the Internet.
High-quality medical content already exists and is digitized, however what is needed is an organization to facilitate connections between content providers and medical institutions in developing countries. Additional benefits include new global partnerships emerging from increased interaction among physicians and medical educators across the globe and greater healthcare capacity in countries where the brain drain has exacerbated an already severe shortage in trained medical staff.
GMK was founded to meet these challenges and endeavors to learn about medical training needs in developing countries and formulate technology-based solutions.
