Healthcare and Life Sciences
Techies Without Borders Expands Global Healthcare Access With Accelerated Computing
Objective
As an international nonprofit, Techies Without Borders (TWB) advances social development by using the latest technologies to address critical challenges in underserved communities. Its flagship initiative, Continuing Medical Education Solutions (CMES), is an example of how AI drives positive impact, currently reaching more than 17,000 healthcare practitioners in 19 countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands.
By using NVIDIA AI and accelerated computing, TWB delivers rapid, reliable access to essential medical knowledge for continuing education and licensing to physicians, physician assistants, nurses, prehospital providers, and community health practitioners, improving healthcare delivery for 20 million people each year.
Customer
Techies Without Borders (TWB)
Topic
Accelerated Computing Tools & Techniques
Key Takeaways
- CMES supports over 17,000 healthcare practitioners across 19 low- and middle-income countries, improving care for 20 million people each year.
- Powered by NVIDIA NIM™, query response time dropped from 5 minutes to just 2 seconds.
- Token processing speed also jumped 22x—from 0.83 to 18.23 tokens per second—delivering faster, richer medical insights.
Bridging the Medical Knowledge Gap
In many low- and middle-income countries, healthcare professionals face barriers to up-to-date medical information—limited internet connectivity, insufficient local content, and language obstacles can slow care and compromise outcomes.
TWB saw the urgent need for an AI-powered platform, designed to deliver timely, evidence-based answers in real time, even in resource-limited settings. With a focus on practical impact, the team set out to build a solution tailored to the realities of frontline care.
AI-Powered Medical Knowledge
TWB’s CMES-AI experimental platform harnesses the power of AI, providing healthcare workers with instant access to a rich, always-current medical knowledge base. With generative AI, CMES becomes a “doctor’s assistant in a box,” providing clinicians with quick, evidence-based answers in their own language.
The build began with an NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU, driving the training and fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) for clinical intelligence and accuracy.
For clinics, TWB deploys CMES on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano™ Developer Kit. This compact AI computer enables CMES to operate right inside clinics, reliably delivering answers—no matter the connectivity. And TWB integrated a preferred orchestration of NVIDIA NIM inference microservices to supercharge response times and processing capability.
“Partnering with NVIDIA elevates CMES to the next frontier of our mission to equip frontline clinicians with world‑class medical knowledge, transforming care and closing critical gaps in health outcomes globally,” said Manoj Thomas, cofounder and president of Techies Without Borders. One doctor on the ground in Papua New Guinea shared that this technology was like having a second doctor in places where there is already a physician shortage. “Improving speed and providing reliable responses was important, but we also wanted to partner with an organization that believes trustworthiness is foundational end-to-end,” says Thomas.
Accelerating Access to Lifesaving Knowledge With AI
CMES-AI is being tested in six sites across The Gambia, Papua New Guinea, and Ecuador—with measurable results in clinics and training centers. For example, in places with high lead exposure, such as Guatemala, a doctor might ask, “What is the symptomatic lead toxicity treatment for children?” Treatment decisions made by the treating clinician need to be accurate and tailored to individual clinical circumstances. Powered by NVIDIA Nemotron™ Rerank, Embed, and Instruct NIM microservices, CMES slashed query processing time from 5 minutes to just 2 seconds. For healthcare practitioners in low- and middle-income countries facing heavy patient load, that means better, faster decisions with every patient.
Token processing speed jumped from 0.83 tokens per second to 18.23 tokens per second—a 22x acceleration. Crucially, this speed improvement is backed by 26% gain in context recall compared to OpenAI and 32.5% gain in latency compared to the MedLLaMA3-v20 model with NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU. By minimizing latency while maximizing referential accuracy, CMES-AI moved from “tag-based processing” to “natural language queries,” enabling caregivers to access richer insights at the point of care. That performance unlocks richer insights and transforms how caregivers support their communities.
Today, CMES puts actionable knowledge directly into the hands of thousands of healthcare professionals—enabling better diagnoses, more effective treatment planning, and higher quality care for
“Partnering with NVIDIA elevates CMES to the next frontier of our mission to equip frontline clinicians with world‑class medical knowledge, transforming care and closing critical gaps in health outcomes globally.”
Manoj Thomas
Cofounder and president, Techies Without Borders
With these strong results, Techies Without Borders is moving rapidly to expand the reach of CMES. The organization is scaling deployments across new geographies and building strategic partnerships to enable more healthcare providers to benefit from NVIDIA-powered AI solutions.
Trustworthy AI principles are foundational for end-to-end development and essential for technical excellence.