How Mercy Ships and Tech Partners Bring Healthcare to Remote Areas

Mercy Ships is on a mission to bring advanced healthcare to some of the most remote places in the world. They use two large hospital ships, the Global Mercy and the Africa Mercy, to serve low-income communities in Africa. These ships are like floating cities, with over 800 people on board, including medical staff, families, and volunteers. The ships dock in areas where internet access is limited, and the metal walls make wireless coverage even more challenging. To overcome these challenges, Mercy Ships has partnered with Cisco and Presidio, a global IT solutions provider. Together, they are upgrading the ships' infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted medical services. The team designed two onboard data centers for redundancy and spent time physically walking the ship to see how Wi-Fi signals behaved from room to room. The network runs almost entirely on Cisco equipment, including switches, phones, and telepresence systems. One of the biggest challenges for Mercy Ships is keeping up with technology while building new ships. The Global Mercy took nearly seven years to complete, partly because of the pandemic. The next ship, Africa Mercy II, isn't expected to enter service until 2028. With such long timelines, hardware may already be outdated by the time the ship launches. Therefore, it requires a different level of planning to deal with all the complexity. Artificial intelligence is starting to gradually make its way into operations. At the moment, it's mostly used for day-to-day clinical work. Some of the surgical tools and imaging systems include deterministic AI features, such as image classification, which helps doctors review patient scans faster. Mercy Ships is also looking at newer AI capabilities, such as generative models, but these are still in the early planning stage and will depend on the infrastructure that's being built now. Connectivity is one of the biggest limitations. Cloud-based AI isn't reliable enough to use for patient care in remote locations. To get around that, the teams are working toward localizing more of the compute on the ship by adding graphics processing units. But they must be powered and cooled properly inside a steel vessel. Presidio and Cisco have already factored these requirements into the modernization plan, since running workloads locally reduces the amount of data that must move over slow satellite links. Telemedicine plays a big role as well. The ships use Webex and other telepresence tools for remote consultations, sometimes with multiple doctors reviewing a case together. These sessions require stability, particularly in ports where outside connectivity is unpredictable. The same goes for training. Mercy Ships uses simulation and other digital tools to train local medical teams so they can continue providing care after the ship leaves. Going forward, implementing new tools such as Cisco IQ would allow Mercy Ships to optimize limited bandwidth from shore. Cisco IQ provides visibility into an organization's entire asset inventory, including device health, software versions, and lifecycle timelines. It's enabled by agentic AI or a collection of specialized AI agents that analyze, diagnose and resolve problems. The goal right now is getting the infrastructure ready, especially with a new ship under construction. Most of the work being done today — building out local compute, strengthening the network, and reducing reliance on external connectivity — will eventually make those AI capabilities possible. Mercy Ships is focused on running the hospital and giving volunteers the support they need to do their work. Everything else will follow.