Leveraging digital innovations to quantum leaps in global health
Violence against hospitals—manifested in physical attacks against patients, workers, and facilities as well as in cyberattacks on hospitals—has been on the rise worldwide. Cyberattacks include a variety of threats from brute force and Denial-of-Service attacks to the use of phishing and malware or social engineering methods to compromise security.
Continue reading “Cyberattacks against hospitals and best practices”
AGRONet leverages its information from electronic health records, flu-related Google searches and historical flu activity in a given location. Improved accuracy has been achieved by adding a second model, which draws on spatial-temporal patterns of flu spread in neighbouring areas [1]. Furthermore, the machine learning system was “trained” by feeding it flu predictions from both models as well as actual flu data, helping to reduce errors in the predictions.
Continue reading “ARGONet: the most accurate estimates of influenza activity available to date”
The 2016 Zika outbreak in the Americas was a public health emergency of international concern. Alongside traditional approaches, several digital technologies were used to tackle this rapidly spreading global health threat. A recent review, identified several domains of digital technologies which were utilised during the Zika outbreak, such as computational modelling , big data , mobile health , and other novel technologies [1].
This week’s blogpost focuses on the development of a rather remarkable piece of homegrown innovation. Stories of restoring a paraplegic’s ability to walk was something previously confined to the pages of ancient divine texts, yet scientists from EPFL based at Campus Biotech in Geneva have managed to achieve the seemingly miraculous. Their success has been a combination of brilliant scientific minds, innovative technology and dedication to a common goal, which has led to this breakthrough.
Continue reading “Spinal implant helps paraplegics walk again”
“The right intervention to the right population at the right time”
“We’ve designed Zipline to solve the second half of this problem. We know who needs medicine, when and where. And now, we can get them that medicine as quickly as possible”
“It’s not about shaming. It’s just about being honest.”
Founded in 2002, the Global Fund is partnership organisation designed to accelerate the end of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria as pandemics. Through continued work with governments, civil society and the private sector, the Global Fund strengthens local health systems and improves communities, by raising money to invest in prevention, treatment and care services [1].
Continue reading “Advocating for an expanded mandate of the Global Fund”
“Supporting Universal Health Coverage by modelling physical accessibility to health care”
AccessMod 5.0 is a World Health Organisation (WHO) tool, a free and open-source standalone software to model how physically accessible existing health services are to the target population, to estimate the part of the target population that would not receive care despite being physically accessible due to shortage of capacity in these services (human or equipment), to measure referral times and distances between health facilities, and to identify where to place new health facilities to increase population coverage through the scaling up analysis [1].
