Muso
Model & Strategy
Globally, 5.9 million children died in 2014 before their 5th birthday – most from diseases with known means of prevention and treatment. Muso is building a scalable global model for stopping preventable deaths in the world’s poorest communities. Muso creates ultra-rapid health systems, optimized to save lives by reaching patients early in the course of their illness. Community health workers and community member search for patients through door-to-door home visits in order to connect them with health care early. Community health workers also provide a package of life-saving health care services in home during these visits. Muso removes point-of-care fees, builds infrastructure and trains staff so that government clinics can provide universal, early access to care.
Ari Johnson is a physician and Assistant Professor in the division of Global Health Sciences at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Muso’s co-founders, as researchers in Mali, found themselves attending the funerals of babies and young mothers weekly, and accompanying their Malian neighbors as they struggled and often failed to access health care. It was out of these experiences that they founded Muso. Initially run by volunteers out of a converted storage closet, Muso is now a rapidly growing organization, building a scalable model and achieving global impact. Trained at Harvard, Brown, and UCSF, Ari is a Goldwater Scholar, winner of the McIlwain Award, the 2014 UCSF Global Service Award, the 2014 UCSF Innovation Challenge and the Harvard Presidential Scholars Public Service Award.
IMPACT
A 2018 study in BMJ Global Health documented that the areas where Muso works in peri-urban Mali have achieved and sustained the lowest rates of child death in sub-Saharan Africa, five years running.
In 2019, Muso operated nine sites across two regions of Mali, supported 381 CHWs, and provided care to 350,000 patients through 143,110 clinic visits and 1,446,488 home visits.
In 2019, Mali’s government announced a health care reform to take many of the interventions tested with Muso to a national scale and serve Mali’s 19M citizens, with Muso providing intensive support for this plan.
Muso has now signed a partnership agreement with the government of Côte d’Ivoire to provide technical assistance to their national community health plan, which is intended to reach 24M people.
