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IBM recently named the first five winners of the company’s new IBM Health Corps grants, providing $2.5 million worth of public health-related pro bono consulting by some of IBM’s most talented employees around the world over the next six months.
After reviewing the entries of over 100 applicant organizations, the first five projects chosen aim to increase the availability of chemotherapy medicines in sub Saharan Africa; better track and control Zika, dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases in Taiwan and Panama; foster more informed community health interventions in the Southeast United States; and increase access to diagnostic radiology in underserved countries.
Organizations with their selected projects include:
- American Cancer Society Currently, very few cancer patients in sub Saharan Africa receive chemotherapy, correlating with significantly lower cancer survival rates than in developed countries. IBM will provide support for the creation of a chemotherapy-forecasting tool that may allow ACS, ministries of health in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Uganda, and other global health partners to increase the availability and lower the cost of cancer treatments.
- Duke Health and Duke Center for Community & Population Health Improvement Residents in greater Durham, North Carolina in the U.S. are committed to improving health for everyone in their community. IBM will work with Duke Health to establish a framework for an analytics platform that will help stakeholders from health, business, public, and other sectors share their health improvement efforts with each other and measure the impact of their efforts on community health.
- Gorgas Memorial Institute, Panama. Panama has seen recent Zika and Chikungunya outbreaks, as well as the re-emergence of dengue fever, but lacks a real-time surveillance system for relaying timely information from field investigators to researchers, health officials and policy makers. IBM will design a mobile application to enable public health field investigators to collect and immediately send geo-located information on disease outbreaks and mosquito breeding sites to the Ministry of Health.
- RAD-AID – a not-for-profit that provides medical imaging services and support for developing countries including Laos, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Nepal, and Ghana. IBM will recommend a framework for increasing digital radiology capacity in RAD-AID’s partner countries, including secure cloud-based storage of radiological scans. This will enable doctors to compare a patient’s medical images over time, making more accurate and effective tracking and diagnosing of medical conditions more likely.
- Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (CDC) – Dengue fever outbreaks have surged in Taiwan in the past two years and are expected to worsen in the coming years, according to the Taiwan CDC. IBM Health Corps will apply predictive analytics to identify regions at greater risk and help the Taiwan CDC to set priorities for dengue vaccination and mosquito control.
Why the IBM Health Corps program?
While there have been substantial reductions in mortality and the burden of disease globally over the past decades, significant disparities in health outcomes and healthcare persist at the local, national and international levels. We believe these health disparities are rooted in three key systemic causes:
- Lack of access to health services
- Substandard quality of healthcare and treatments
- Social and physical systems that negatively impact health, including unsafe water, unstable housing, and inadequate access to nutritious food.
Our mission for IBM Health Corps: The private sector, in cooperation with civil society and government, can play a major role in solving these health challenges; innovation in data collection, analytics, and technology has driven major health improvements over the past century. Leading global health researchers have declared that, for the first time in human history, we have the financial and technical capacity to eliminate key health disparities between lower and higher income nations, preventing nearly 130 million deaths by 2030 – and this can be achieved within our lifetimes. Strategic investment in research and development of health technology, particularly by the private sector, is central to realizing this vision.
Learn more at IBM Health Corps.