Novartis announces Sandoz Healthcare Access Challenge
A challenge for the world’s best pharmaceuticals corporation to get healthcare to the people who need it the most.
According to WHO, in collaboration with World Bank Group, there are around 400 million people who are not with the access to the necessary health services. An approximate of 6% of people belong to the low- and middle-income countries. These people are pushed towards poverty because of the severe health spending. This brings us to Novartis’ Sandoz Healthcare Access Challenge that aims towards a better and healthy nation. It aims at reaching out to the people who are unaware of the importance of healthcare or have limited access to it.
This is the second Sandoz Healthcare Access Challenge; the first one talked about mobile-health, and this time it is all about “Leveraging Digital Technologies to Solve Healthcare Access Challenges” which means using technology as a weapon to spread healthcare access like fire in a forest towards the areas with low awareness or to reach more people.
It is a challenge for entrepreneurs and innovators to take part in so that they can come up with good technological ideas to drive patients or people towards healthcare and reach the other local parts.
The advancement of technology and mobile technology can lead to a lot of healthcare access. Mobile devices usage is something which is only growing and not at all descending. These devices are nowadays playing a big role in health care for elders, adults, to-be-mothers and many more. They are reminding people to take medicines on time and helping people save money in the field of healthcare.
This challenge aims to have the best ideas from the competitors no matter how small it is. The ideas can make a community or a city a healthy place with unlimited healthcare access and healthcare services. All kinds of digital ideas that help in the outreach of healthcare access are welcomed, no matter how big or small the ideas are.
The shortlist is to be announced in January 2019, and the ideas that will be appreciated and liked a lot will be funded by Sandoz so as to implement them and break healthcare access barriers around. Small ideas with even a tiny spark will be brought to life to help every community that is unaware or has limited healthcare access.
Those with the best of the best ideas will get the chance to travel to Texas in March 2019 and win seed funding for launching the plan or idea. #SandozHACk is the trending hashtag for the challenge.
Image credit: www.sandoz.com
