The Grameen Foundation was providing health care to pregnant women in Ghana in 2010 when it came up with a new idea: As cellphones become more widely available in developing nations, health information can be more quickly disseminated to poor patients in remote locations via voice and text messaging.

Three years later, the foundation's thesis has given rise to an open-source software platform called Mobile Technology for Community Health (Motech), which an increasing number of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian groups are using to address pandemics such as tuberculosis and HIV.

"We're a nonprofit developing software that we hope other nonprofits will build on top of," said John Tippett, director of mobile health innovations. "It's a pretty cool position to be in . . . because we can have an impact pretty broadly."