Watch ORTEC and North Star Alliance win the 2013 GBCHealth “Technology for Health” Award

On May 16th, North Star Alliance and long time partner ORTEC were awarded the 2013 Technology for Health Award at the GBCHealth Business Action on Health Awards in New York, in recognition of their combined efforts to track and counter the spread of disease with a unique electronic health passport system, called COMETS. Today, we’re excited to share a short video with you from the award ceremony. Click on the video above to watch South Africa’s First Lady Madam Ngema Zuma present ORTEC Consulting CEO Lambert van der Bruggen and ORTEC VP Global Business Consulting Geerhard de Vries with the award. You can learn more about our partnership with ORTEC, and see photographs from the award ceremony below.

North Star Alliance and ORTEC

In 2009, ORTEC, one of the world’s leading providers of optimisation software solutions, joined our network of partners and began working on a unique program that would allow our staff to access client medical records, across borders, at any one of our “Blue Box” clinics in Africa: we called it COMETS. While accessing medical records is an essential part of providing consistent, high quality health care, mobile workers like truck drivers face tremendous barriers to health due largely to the fact that they are always on the move.

In 2006, we set out to address this problem by building a strategically-placed network of clinics (in converted shipping containers) that would deliver public health programmes for people with increased health risks, like truck drivers and sex workers, and primary health care to communities located along Africa’s highways. We chose this approach because shipping containers could be converted using a standard layout and be rapidly deployed to communities in need. To really have an impact on the health of truck drivers, however, we needed to build more than a physical network of clinics – we needed to build a digital network to support them.

To help us accomplish this, ORTEC joined our team and began developing solutions that would not only to enable us to access medical records and client information across our network, but that would allow us to monitor and evaluate the impact of our clinics at a local, national, and regional level. Since 2009, COMETS has been installed across our network, and is currently being implemented by other healthcare providers who recognise the importance of creating access to health care without borders.

GBC Health “Technology for Health Award” Photos

Madam Ngema Zuma introduces the award

Madam Ngema Zuma about Mobility and Health

ORTEC Consulting CEO Lambert van der Bruggen

'We can only tackle pressing challenges like HIV effectively, if we look at the root causes...'

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About ORTEC

ORTEC_CoreORTEC Consulting Group specialises in operations research and optimisation, using mathematical models to support a wide range of business decisions and analytical processes. Optimising revenue and supply chains, and providing advanced analytics across a wide range of data. ORTEC Consulting Group is a subsidiary of ORTEC, the world’s leading provider of optimisation software solutions and consulting services. ORTEC has over 1,650 customers worldwide, over 650 employees and offices in Europe, North America, Asia and the Pacific Region. For more information, visit ORTEC Consulting Group at http://www.ortec-consulting.com or ORTEC at http://www.ortec.com.


Photos courtesy of Whitney Kidder for GBCHealth