Pediatric medical expertise is unevenly distributed around the world. In particular, there is a lack of pediatric subspecialists such as pediatric cardiologists in developing countries.

Inspired by a special student, Dr. Anthony Chang (Children’s Hospital of Orange County, California), Dr. Timothy Chou (Stanford University) launched the Pediatric Moonshot in 2020. The mission is to reduce healthcare inequity, lower cost and improve outcomes for children globally by linking all the children’s hospitals in the world on the cloud by creating privacy-preserving real-time applications based on access to data in all 1,000,000 healthcare machines in all 500 children’s hospitals in the world.

As with the original moon shot, the team needed to build a new rocket – a privacy-preserving in-the-building edge cloud service. In 2022, edge zones were deployed in 8 children’s hospitals on 3 continents (North America, South America and Europe).

Today the focus is on two important programs: Mercury and Gemini. Mercury is a global image-sharing network to allow non-children’s hospitals or clinics to share images with experts in the 500 children’s hospitals.

While this is a good first step, in order to achieve the objective of reducing healthcare inequity, we need to use the latest AI technology to build pediatric experts in software, which can be deployed to the point of care globally. Gemini is an AI research lab for children’s medicine. It is designed to pioneer privacy- preserving, de-centralized training of AI applications in medicine

Krsyma Medical AI is a collaborator in Asia and supporter of the Pediatric Moonshot mission.