Geneva Health Forum 2012

The main objective of UniversalDoctor is to facilitate multilingual communication between health professionals and patients who do not share a common language. UniversalDoctor Speaker (UDS) is a well thought-out multilingual application that enables a user to select a preferred language and a discussed topic ranging from general symptoms to more specific medical conditions. It offers pre-set questions and answers in order to facilitate communication. Taking a basic (UDS) as a reference UniversalDoctor designs customized applications aimed to be used by hospitals, and offers a number of mobile applications that facilitate patient mobility for people suffering medical conditions, including chronic diseases.

Increasingly we use smart-phones that assist us throughout our daily life activities, and that are usually carried out in our pockets. In our research, we aim to assess the feasibility of using phones to track users physical activity and estimate their energy expenditure. Activity Level Estimator (ALE) is an unobtrusive, background application developed for Android-based phones and it uses the phone’s built-in accelerometer sensor.

During 2009, a section 21 Organisation, Cause Marketing Fundraisers was provided with seed funding from Pfizer Global Health Foundation, to embark on the provision of free mammography and education services to indigent women in the public or government sector in South Africa. This proposal was developed to address a lack of provision of quality breast cancer screening services in a developing country. This is due to:• Lack of accessibility to health care centers or screening sites, both within rural and non-urban areas.• Lack of resources within the public sector to support such screening, this includes inadequately qualified staff, limited facilities, as well as insufficient numbers of staff to provide a service. There are only 6 Apex, or referral centers in the public sector nationally, which need to service a population of some 48 million.

With Diabetes leading the exponential increase of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), innovative and effective solutions are becoming urgent to tackle the challenge of diseases that require long-term care, and for the patient to actively participate in the disease management. The growing burden of NCDs, with the crying lack of healthcare personnel in low and-middle income countries (LMIC) creates a complex issue while limited means are available. This situation led to the creation of a diabetes education and support platform fully carried trough SMS, allowing information to reach thousands of patients and providing a reliable channel to ask questions about diabetes.

Worldwide habitual daily physical activity levels are decreasing and contribute to the burden of non-communicable disease. Physical activity has therefore become a central theme of international, national and local health promotion campaigns. Popular running events represent an interesting potential for health promotion. This project describes how school children health promotion activities have been established in parallel to the biggest road running race in Switzerland, the Escalade run which attracts, every year, more than 25’000 participants in Geneva.

Recurrence of cardiovascular events and mortality remain high after an acute coronary syndrome (ACS), but despite guidelines recommending pharmacologic and lifestyle interventions, up to 30% of patients stop their treatment either partially or totally early with a significant increase in one year mortality. The ELIPS programme is a Geneva driven Swiss multicentric project to improve the prevention of cardiovascular event recurrence after acute coronary syndromes.This multi-level secondary prevention programme targets the treatment of multiple cardiovascular risk factors of patients after an ACS. It is multidimensional because its interventions target not only patients, but also health care providers and the overall health care system with an aim to increase prescription rates of proven efficacious medication, promote lifestyle changes, and ultimately decrease mortality and ACS recurrence.

An organization run for youth by youth, AYUDA’s work is based on the idea that youth can be agents of change in diabetes communities, where a lack of education is as dangerous as a lack of insulin. The NGO has established an international volunteer program that mobilizes individuals (many of whom have diabetes themselves) – ranging from high school students to world-class medical professionals – to support diabetes leadership and empowerment programs primarily throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world, has a diabetes prevalence of 3.3%. This condition is already in this country, a major cause of death, the leading cause of blindness, and of 60% of non-traumatic amputations. Despite the limited human resources to improve the care of people with diabetes, Mali has set up pilot approaches, based on close collaboration between the NGO “Santé Diabète” and the Moh of Mali, focusing on decentralization of care, access to medicines, education and prevention.