The Global Health Case Challenge 2016 - Antibiotic Resistance

World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe provided the case for this years Global Health Case Challenge, which this time was a part of the European EIT Health Campus programme. The event was arranged and hosted by the School of Global Health, SUND Innovation Hub and the Section for General Practice at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen.

SUND Dean Ulla Wewer opened this years Global Health Case Challenge and 15 teams began 24 hours of hard work to find and present the most innovative and viable cross-disciplinary solution to the WHO Europe case challenge: How can availability, uptake and usage of rapid diagnostic tools as Point-of-Care-Tests be improved to facilitate responsible use of antibiotics in primary care?

193 students (35 teams) had applied to take part in the Global Health Case Challenge on Antibiotic Resistance. The 73 students (15 teams) selected for participation came from 26 different countries and together represented 28 different study programmes at top universities across Europe.

‘When you ask students from different fields of study and cultural backgrounds to work together, you get exponentially different perspectives on a problem. The ideas will be diverse, facilitating a completely different level of creative suggested solutions. At the same time, the aim of the School of Global Health is to strengthen the students’ job readiness and chances of networking across countries and fields of study, and here the case challenge format represents a unique opportunity’, Professor and Director of School of Global Health Flemming Konradsen explained right before the disclosure of the case question and was presented.

The appointed jury consisting of six experts within antibiotic resistance and health innovation had to make the tough decision: Who would win this year’s case challenge and travel to Barcelona to pitch their idea and receive guidance from WHO Europe on how to proceed?

The winning team

A great number of empty coffee pots and energy drink cans was all that was left in the Info Hall on Friday afternoon. The teams moved to CSS for the final decision. Here each team gave an oral presentation of their idea in front of the jury and the audience. After several intense presentation rounds and voting by the judges, Team 3 was called to the stage. 24 hours of hard work and the ability to sell their idea to the jury and large audience earned them the first place.

The team consisted of three medical students from The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, UCPH – Johan Bundgaard, Mark Khurana and Troels Rømer – one student of International Business & Politics at the Copenhagen Business School Kasper Djernæs and one student of Medicine and Technology at the Technical University of Copenhagen/University of Copenhagen Jakob Simonsen. The team presented the web app Acumulus, which is an A.I. computing service comparing symptoms with big data such as epidemiological data, infections and clinical data.

The team won a trip to go and present their idea at the EIT Health Summit in Barcelona and then again to experts from WHO Europe.

You can read more about their participation at the EIT Health Summit in Barcelona in this article (click).

Parts of above text is from article in ‘SUND Indsigt’, the Newsletter of the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.