Adapting technology to social benefit - and being self-sustaining

NEW YORK (AP) - Before age 30, Paul Meyer had trudged through refugee camps in Africa to reconnect families, wrestled with a finicky generator to launch Internet service in postwar Kosovo and written speeches for President Clinton. He managed to squeeze in Yale Law School, too.

Now 33, Meyer has shifted his peripatetic existence into a steady gig - head of Voxiva Inc., a company he founded in 2001 to help developing countries monitor disease outbreaks and other health information.

The fast-talking Meyer comes across as a no-nonsense, on-the-move CEO. But he and Voxiva are guided by a refreshingly pragmatic mantra shaped in his earlier stints - the latest technology can't solve everything.

Voxiva's databases collect information from doctors in remote villages and map it out so health officials can spot potential outbreaks quickly. In traditional paper-based bureaucracies, illnesses can ravage an entire region before the mail brings the national health ministry word of even one death.

But how to connect the new databases to places where computers and e-mail - sometimes even electricity - are years away? Meyer's practical inspiration was to create a system that doesn't care whether data comes over the Internet or from a phone.

In Voxiva's system, Web-less doctors and nurses send their findings by dialing a toll-free number and punching pre-arranged codes into an automated voice menu. They can leave a voice mail with details about patients' conditions, or listen to a message with up-to-date medical advice.

"You don't even really have to be literate to use the system," Meyer says. "If people have a computer, great. If people have nothing more than a pay phone in a village, OK."

Meyer and Voxiva's co-founder, former U.S. aid official Pamela Johnson - who happens to be Meyer's mother - originally figured Voxiva would roam the world's troubled zones. To their surprise, Voxiva's initial successes, in Peru, attracted interest in the United States.

Voxiva has set up a monitoring system for U.S. troops who got the smallpox vaccine, and for schools in San Diego and Washington, D.C. It also runs its service for health officials in Baghdad and the U.S.-funded HIV/AIDS initiative in Rwanda.

And Voxiva's system can be used for much more than health reporting. Three Peruvian cities use it to track crime.

Despite Meyer's background - and the fact that Voxiva's initial investors included the Markle Foundation, a tech-focused nonprofit - the company isn't purely altruistic.

Meyer expects Voxiva to make money on every project, so the company can finance its own expansion rather than go hat in hand to donors. He says the 90-employee company, based in Washington, D.C., will become profitable this year. He doesn't rule out taking the company public someday.

"This is not a Robin Hood model," he says. "We plan on becoming a really big, profitable company - but obviously a company still focused on making the world this better place."

To be sure, such high-minded talk sometimes masks traditional ways of doing business. But Meyer has earned the right to speak about making a difference.


