Carlos Slim Foundation announces its partnership with Elizabeth Holmes and her Theranos Company to promote the proactive prevention of diabetes and related ailments
June 22, 2015. Mexico City.
- Innovation to diagnose chronic diseases, available to everyone.
- Timely and suitable information on the health condition of individuals, to promote the adoption of healthier lifestyles.
- The initiative joins the Foundation's CASALUD Model to improve services to patients in health centers across Mexico.
The Carlos Slim Foundation (FCS in Spanish) and Elizabeth Holmes have gone beyond the paradigm of individual healthcare supporting a new way to prevent disease by means of state of the art low-cost technologies. A non-for profit partnership has been announced to implement the innovative CASALUD model platform sponsored by FCS.
CASALUD is an initiative developed and implemented by FCS to support the re-engineering of services provided by health centers, offering better quality attention and focusing on the proactive prevention of ailments like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. The model is supported by technological tools that are used to train medical personnel, and that guarantee the opportune detection of diseases and improve the supply of medicines. The initiative is part of the National Strategy against Diabetes and Obesity. Since 2013, CASALUD operates in partnership with the federal Secretariat of Health and the governments of twenty Mexican states. Likewise, the model is developed in coordination with IMSS-Prospera and ISSSTE (Mexican social security institutes).
MIDO, an Integrated Model for Timely Detection, is one of CASALUD components specialized in proactive prevention. It evaluates 5 risk factors: weight, blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and kidney function. This helps identify healthy individuals from those who are at risk of developing diabetes, obesity or high-blood pressure, as well as those individuals already affected by anyone of these ailments.
Elizabeth Holmes visited Mexico to launch this new social project with the Carlos Slim Foundation. Several leading international magazines have recognized Mrs. Holmes as a visionary person capable of identifying technological solutions to transform healthcare worldwide. She explained that with her technological advancements it is now possible to perform an ever-wider array of laboratory tests, at low cost, and from a single drop of blood, obtained with no needles and no pain. This innovation means her method is readily accessible to the entire population.
This is why the Foundation's partnership with Holmes will foster the implementation of the MIDO initiative across Mexico, performing more tests in a faster and more efficient manner. By providing easier access to these tests and the corresponding results, it is expected that individuals react more positively and adopt healthier lifestyles.
Expected results
- Attain greater disposition from individuals to follow healthier lifestyles, because people will be able to obtain suitable and timelier information about their health situation.
- With MIDO and the Theranos tests it will be possible to provide opportune diagnosis to persons who ignore they are already affected by illnesses like diabetes, high-blood pressure and/or dyslipidemia.
- The first steps of this new partnership will take place in health centers already working with the CASALUD initiative, where the Holmes tests will be introduced. This first phase will allow measuring efficiency of the clinical diagnosis processes as well as to analyze results and lifestyle changes in patients visiting health centers. The aim is to extend these benefits to the entire Mexican population.
About Elizabeth Holmes
Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 with the aim to make health readily accessible to everyone, by promoting the early detection of disease. Elizabeth departed from Stanford University's School of Engineering to build Theranos on the basis of her patents. She firmly believes that health information is a human right on its own. Today, she leads a company that has gone beyond the paradigms of health and prevention thanks to its laboratory tests performed from one or two drops of blood, instead of several tubes, and at a much lower cost.
About the Carlos Slim Foundation
Created in 1986, the Carlos Slim Foundation supports high impact programs focused on the most vulnerable populations, benefitting millions of persons. With its high sense of social responsibility, efficiency and opportunity, the Foundation offers programs in the following sectors: education, health, nutrition, justice, culture, human development, natural disaster relief, employment, environmental protection and conservation, among others. Through its programs the Foundation contributes to ameliorate the living conditions of populations in all age groups, fostering human capital development and creating opportunities for the integrated development of individuals and their communities.
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