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Healthcare is responsible for some 4–5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The healthcare sector has a vital role to play in climate change mitigation efforts, which will not only result in substantial reductions in emissions, but can often lead to enhanced patient care, staff satisfaction, and cost savings.

Siemens Healthineers has set clear goals to reduce net CO2 emissions to 130 kilotons in 2025 and become fully carbon neutral by 2030.

Siemens Healthineers and Dame Jackie Daniel, CEO of The Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, have analysed the approach and steps that her hospital has taken to raise awareness of the problem and reduce its carbon footprint.

Highlights from the conversation:

Listen to the podcast here

Johnson & Johnson premiered Eureka Moments, a weekly series airing every Tuesday at noon EST on Johnson & Johnson’s YouTube Channel.

Eureka Moments shares the stories of the innovators behind the breakthroughs. We see the headlines, we read the news, we watch experts discuss and debate the science and innovation, but who are the actual people taking on the greatest health challenges of our time? What inspires them? Why do they persevere against all odds? What does it take to go after impossible problems? Eureka Moments is Johnson & Johnson's attempt to bring you their stories.

During the series premiere, show host Seema Kumar, Global Head, Office of Innovation, Global Health and Scientific Engagement connected Black innovators working with to help advance health equity for people in their communities.

Royal Philips, a global leader in health technology, today announced it has received a $15.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) based application suite to improve the quality and accessibility of obstetric care in low- and middle-income countries, especially in underserved communities.

By helping front-line healthcare workers such as midwives to identify potential problems in pregnancy at an early stage, the project aims to significantly reduce the number of women who die as a result of pregnancy - currently around 830 women every day worldwide - while reducing fetal mortality and morbidity.

The project plans to develop an application suite that will be deployed on Philips Handheld Ultrasound – Lumify – which is currently in widespread use in community-based mother and child care programs around the world.

It also builds on the expertise of the Philips Foundation, providing access to quality healthcare for underserved communities worldwide, including a program in Kenya to educate midwives to deliver ultrasound-based antenatal pregnancy screening in village clinics, while receiving telehealth support from radiologists at distance.

Read more here.

Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health, with Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., have announced a three-year initiative to address social determinants of health that contribute to heart disease in underserved Philadelphia neighbourhoods.

The $3 million "Closing the Gap" programme will be led by Jefferson’s Philadelphia Collaborative for Health Equity.

Clinical trial recruitment is expensive, inefficient and time-consuming. As COVID-19 therapeutics move through fast-tracked research pipelines and into clinical trials, it is critical to effectively recruit patients – including those from more vulnerable populations who consistently battle inequities in access to care – into those trials while protecting patient privacy.

ConsenSys Health and a large pharmaceutical company researched a privacy-preserving blockchain-orchestrated federated computing approach to clinical trial matching.

Processing electronic health record data was considerably faster with hardware-enhanced security through ConsenSys Health’s Elevated Compute platform optimized for Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) on the latest 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform, compared to previous systems.

The benefits of this privacy-preserving approach can be applied across the global pharmaceutical industry to improve patient matching for clinical trials and accelerate treatment discoveries.

Read more here.

Cancer has emerged as a priority in the global health and development agenda because of its ongoing increasing disease burden and its profound social and economic impact.

Recognizing the benefit for women’s health, the Islamic Development Bank and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have identified breast and cervical cancers as a focus for action.

The Call for Innovation: Saving Women's Lives from Cancer initiative aims to identify, encourage and reward innovative proposals for strengthening national health systems in the area of breast and cervical cancer prevention, early detection, diagnosis and treatment by expanding and scaling-up capacities for effective, safe and sustainable cancer services.

Scientists, Innovators, SMEs, Private Firms, Non-Governmental Organizations, Governments and Academic or Research and Development Institutions around the world are invited to participate.

Read more about eligibility and winning criteria here

In a landmark decision, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved the first new treatment for Alzheimer’s disease in nearly two decades. There is some debate in the scientific community, however, over whether there is enough evidence that the treatment has significant benefits for patients.

In order to continue marketing the drug, Biogen will need to complete a large clinical trial to confirm that the drug has cognitive benefits, the FDA said.

In approving the drug on a conditional basis, the agency departed from decades of regulatory precedent, setting a new bar for treatments with considerable potential but unproven benefits — a standard that could also be applied to other diseases.

Read more here.