Brian Levine, the son of Anita Levine of Babylon, and the late Irwin Levine, graduated recently from New York University Medical School in May and is one of 40 scholars at NYU's Reynolds Foundation Program of Social Entrepreneurship. Despite the tremendous demand of his studies, he also worked to help bridge the health-care gap throughout the world.

Levine, Babylon High School's 1998 salutatorian, began his project for the Reynolds Foundation program last year when he went to Ghana to promote a new website to help West African doctors and their counterparts in the United States understand each other's health-care culture better. He quickly discovered that the internet connections and the lack of computers in Ghana made that an unrealistic goal.

What was readily available, and what everyone in the country had, was a cell phone. And the reception was excellent.

As a result he authored a plan to provide a unified, unlimited free cellular system to all of the 2,000 physicians in the county. Within three months, more than 75 percent of doctors signed up and made thousands of calls to each other on what Levine called the Medicare Line.

"The cost is minimal and the benefit is huge," Levine said in a news article recently. "If doctors are talking, health care will improve."

Levine said that if the program is useful it could become the standard for patient treatment around the world. He has already been invited to speak on the program in Africa in an effort to expand it throughout the continent.

The Babylonian said he hopes to live abroad in Africa, India or Southeast Asia some day, and help to make a difference. "I want to be part of their structural change," he said.