At this year's WIRED Health, pharmaceutical company Sandoz is launching its first-ever startup competition. Sandoz HACk challenges young entrepreneurs to use mobile-health technologies to help bring access to healthcare in tough environments.
The six finalists have flown from across the world to be at the event, being held at 30 Euston Square in London, where they'll pitch to a panel of judges. Here are the startups.
In communities and countries across the world there is often little or no help for refugees suffering from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and other cognitive disorders. This is a significant barrier to restoring health and helping with integration. Benedikt Schmidl and Tanja Schwarzmeier from Germany have the idea of an app that will help identify and prioritize patients, by more efficiently distributing resources using smartphones, improving access to healthcare for those who would otherwise fall under the radar.
Johannes Mangane is a pharmacist in South Africa in rural Mpumalanga. South Africa has numerous rural provinces with limited healthcare facilities and patients are forced to travel substantial distances to collect medicines. To solve this problem, Mangane made PillDrop, a mobile app which aims to increase access of chronic medicines in South Africa by enabling patients to register as users and motorist drivers (vehicles or motorcycles) to register as providers. PillDrop will enable providers to be able to collect and deliver chronic medicines for clients in their clinics.
In Ghana pharmacists don’t generally work in rural areas and pharmacies are staffed by unskilled workers. GoPharma app aims to connect pharmacists in towns with rural pharmacies, allowing face to face patient consultations, prescription reviews, medication orders, clinical interventions and consultations with onside personnel. A machine learning algorithm, which looks at the flow of customers into the pharmacy, will allow one pharmacist to staff multiple locations at one time.
In the Maldives, one out of every 120 new-borns is born with Thalassemia: 85 per cent of these children will not survive till the age of five unless they receive regular blood transfusions, but the nature of the islands makes coordinating blood donations and blood banks very hard. Blood Drive aims to incentivise the act of blood donation. The mobile app will share push notifications and SMS alerts when donor opportunities or emergency situations are occurring and help donors to find nearby donation centres.
In the Philippines, ambulances find it hard to reach accidents quickly in the challenging infrastructure. SALI (formerly known as Save-a-life) app aims to build a community of lifesavers who can administer CPR anywhere, anytime. The interactive app can teach, motivate and guide anyone in administering CPR effectively while providing auxiliary support by connecting the user to a network of fellow life savers and notifying emergency services.
MedMee is a digital healthcare start-up inspired by real-life events faced by the founders. It aims to use advanced machine learning to develop a real-time virtual personal assistant – Casey, a chatbot on Facebook Messenger, to help patients track, remind and order their medications.
Richard Francis, CEO of SandozDr Harald Nusser, Head of Novartis Social BusinessRoberto Acione, CEO of Healthware InternationalFredrik Debong, co-founder of diabetes app MySugrRowland Manthorpe, WIRED
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
