Mary Health: Turning loss into the world’s first device-free Hospital

Felix Davis stood, watching a nurse guide a mother through a smartphone app that felt like a lifeline in a place where electricity flickers like a rumour. The mother, clutching a bottle of pills she bought from a roadside vendor, texted a WhatsApp number. Within seconds, MGH’s software confirmed her medication was fake, one of the 70% of drugs in Africa that could kill instead of cure.

The nurse tapped another option, linking the woman to a doctor via telehealth. No five-hour trek to a clinic. No guesswork. Just care, right there.

Davis, a Dartmouth ’26, wasn’t supposed to be here. Years ago, he was in medical school in Accra, the first in his family to chase that dream. Then Mary Akpene, who raised him, got sick. Breast cancer, stage two, caught too late. In rural Ghana, where over 44% of the population lives, clinics are often a day’s walk, and more than half of breast cancer cases in breastfeeding mothers hit stage three or four, slashing survival odds. Mary died, and Davis’s world broke. 

He left medical school, traded Accra for Dartmouth, and turned his grief into a mission: no one else should lose their Mary because a clinic was too far or a pill was poison. That mission became Mary Global Health, a nonprofit born in Hanover, New Hampshire, to bridge the healthcare gap for the underserved.

Davis tapped Dartmouth College’s network, The Dickey Center for International Understanding, Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship, Thayer School of Engineering, to build something radical: a healthcare system that comes to you, whether you’re in a village with no power or a city with no time.

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The centerpiece? Patient Access Terminals (PATs), solar-powered microclinics now in pre-commercial manufacturing, designed to hum with 400 watts of juice, a 48-hour battery, and 4G/5G or satellite links to work even when the internet doesn’t. 

At Mary Global Health, our mission is to make safe, dignified primary care universal by turning hospitals into software and networks of AI models that deliver intake, triage, support provider diagnostics, prescribing support, care navigation, and follow-up with little to no specialised equipment.

We call this a device-free hospital: offline-first so it runs on a phone, a PAT, or a clinic PC; human-in-the-loop so nurses and doctors stay in control; outcome-tracked and continuously validated against clinical standards; privacy-by-design with consent, encryption, and audit trails; language-aware and culturally respectful; and paired with training that upskills local workers.

The result is quality care that meets people where they live, through PATs and simple chat interfaces, using minimal power, minimal hardware, and low cost, without compromising safety or dignity.

These ATM-like stations, built to endure minus-10 to 50-degree Celsius extremes, are no sci-fi gimmick. They’re triage hubs set to scan vital signs, run lab tests, store health records, and link patients to doctors via telemedicine once deployed.

Take that mother in the village. Her WhatsApp interaction didn’t just spot fake meds. It analyzed her reported symptoms via AI triage, flagging a potential infection. A nurse, trained locally through Mary Global Health’s programs, reviewed the data and connected her to a specialist in Accra, 200 miles away, in minutes. The same system lets anyone text a WhatsApp number to verify FDA-approved drugs or manufacturers, critical when 70% of Africa’s meds are fake.

Others use mymari.org to chat about symptoms or talktomary.org for a digital companion that explains health in plain words, like a friend who happens to know medicine.

The PATs are evolving in manufacturing.

One demo uses olfactory sensors to detect infections through breath, a game-changer for rapid diagnostics in remote areas.

Another employs visual health screening, analyzing skin or eye conditions via high-res cameras. An adaptive algorithm, still in testing, optimizes outreach, tailoring health campaigns to local needs based on real-time data.

These innovations are tools to confront inequality at its root, from maternal mortality to fake-drug deaths. Back in that village, the mother walked away from the WhatsApp session with a prescription, a telehealth follow-up, and trust in her care, trust she never had before. Davis watched, knowing this was one story, one life, but the start of millions.

Mary Global Health is fundraising to deploy scores of PATs across Ghana, then Africa, maybe the world. Investors are circling, drawn by a model that’s lean, scalable, and already proving impact through software. Partners, from hospitals to NGOs, see a system that integrates with their work, training local nurses and syncing with existing clinics. Dawn Carey at the Dickey Center calls it Dartmouth’s magic: connecting students like Davis to labs, faculty, and networks to spark real change. But for Davis, it’s simpler. It’s about Mary, about mothers in villages, about a world where healthcare isn’t a privilege, it’s a right.

Act now: meet “Mary,” our AI digital companion, at talktomary.org; contact us to create a digital persona of someone you love; or purchase a customized Patient Access Terminal (PAT) in their name. Each PAT is deployed to a remote community, delivering AI-guided triage, telehealth, and medicine verification while keeping that person’s memory alive.

Join the mission at maryglobal.health to bridge healthcare divides and provide primary care anywhere.