With the rise of healthcare technologies, we have come a long way in creating healthier populations by decreasing maternal and child mortality, increasing life expectancy through nutrition and sanitation, and creating a generally healthier population. However, with new innovations come new problems and we must learn how to tackle the issues that may arise to further advance general health in underserved areas. Many new healthcare technologies today are going from the lab directly to the ground. The issue with this practice is that people don’t take into account the barriers that come along with implementing a new technology including but not limited to cultural stigma, policy driven barriers, economic barriers, geographic barriers, and religious barriers. Without taking into account this wide variety of secondary problems, many healthcare technologies will and have failed to successfully impact the community.

With this senior capstone project, I hope to create a toolkit of how to talk to people on the ground and teach entrepreneurs

1. how these barriers can be overcome
2. the right questions to ask in order to identify and map these barriers in a given community
3. create a marketing campaign that is geared specifically towards the individual populations that they are targeting
4. Talk to and train individuals who will be using the specific technologies
5. How to explain the benefits of the technologies in a way that townspeople will openly embrace the technology and eventually use it

Through my major, I have been hoping to further understand the barriers that go along with implementing new technologies into developing areas, both abroad and locally. With this senior project, I hope to tackle exactly this and further my learning through the classes I have to take a more real life application. So far, everything I have learned has been very theoretical but not readily applied to real life interactions. With this toolkit, I am hoping to create a collection of stories and eventually action items that people can use when creating their own social enterprise and steps they can take to make their projects more successful.