The success of globalisation in many growing economies, especially the BRIC and ASEAN countries, is creating additional demand from new patient groups at all income levels who have the right and desire to gain access to the most modern medical diagnosis and therapy methods.

GEISTER is promoting this development through innovations jointly with medical doctors in these regions and an initiative that aims at facilitating equal access to medical progress by all people. It is an eminent goal of GEISTER to cooperate with medical doctors like Prof. F. W. Mohr at the Leipzig Heart Centre, in creating an ever wider user platform for more gentle cardiovascular surgery techniques, and to make such techniques also available for doctors in the emerging markets. In order to meet the resulting additional demand and to develop the desired medical quality improvements in new therapies at affordable costs and with utmost transparency for the patients, GEISTER is concentrating on its core innovation competences, and is gradually also taking on a more comprehensive technical process responsibility in the field of therapy support for doctors and patients.

 

Major cause of heart-valve diseases worldwide is rheumatic fever (RF) as a consequence of streptococcal disease. Up to 400,000 related deaths occur annually, mostly among children and young adults. According to estimates, RF currently affects around 12 million people worldwide. Two million should be treated surgically; of these, around 1 million cannot afford the treatment, however. Geographically, the rheumatic carditis stretches in a belt from Latin America across Southeast Asia, to the Maghreb region and some African countries, and on into the Middle East. While European rates of rheumatic fever stand at 2 cases per 100,000 residents, in the RF belt they range between 50 and 200. In response, Professor Wajih Maazouzi (MD) at the Ibn Sina University in Rabat, Morocco, has developed an initial biomedical solution for using the body’s own tissue material from the pericardium to reconstruct or completely replace the defective heart valve. The economical and reproducible procedure permits easier access to the therapy for the mostly still very young patients there – an important step towards preventive strategies, tailored together with GEISTER to the specific socio-economic circumstances with distinguished product and process solutions for cardiovascular surgery.

Such increasing process responsibilities place special demands on GEISTER employees and business partners worldwide, because they require clearly defined corporate governance principles, internal and external compliance, sustainability and transparency. As a first step in pursuing its UN Global Compact commitment, GEISTER is therefore preparing a company specific code of conduct, which step by step shall be introduced into and applied to infrastructure services for customers and the employment of gentle and new biomedical therapies.