NIAMEY, 22 April 2016 – SES S.A. (NYSE Euronext Paris and Luxembourg Stock Exchange: SESG), one of the world’s leading satellite operators, announced today the deployment of SATMED, a satellite-based e-health platform, at the CURE Hospital for Children in Niger, to enhance healthcare in rural and remote regions in Niger.
The SATMED e-health platform was conceived by SES Techcom Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of SES, and is funded by the Luxembourg Government and the Ministry for Cooperation and Humanitarian Action. The satellite-based communication solution aims to improve public health in developing countries by enabling multiple medical applications and tools to operate collectively on a single platform.
SATMED will enable CURE Niger to establish communications with national and international doctors to receive medical counselling. Patients can be remotely diagnosed by experts thousands of miles away, doctors and nurses can improve their knowledge through online courses or life sessions, and lives can be saved through easy access to necessary information available anywhere via the internet.
The CURE Hospital for Children in Niger specialises in the surgical treatment of children with disabilities. These children suffer from a variety of different orthopaedic and congenital conditions, such as clubfoot, cleft lip and burn contractures. Since the hospital opened in October 2010, well over 3,000 life-changing surgeries and over 10,000 patient consultations have been performed, both at the hospital and in mobile clinics throughout the country.
“CURE International is very proud to partner with SES and with the government of Luxembourg on this important initiative, which will help bring access to healthcare closer to those who live in remote areas of Niger. Our participation in the SATMED programme will help us better serve our patients, as we seek to offer them healing and hope for a better future,” said Josh Korn, Executive Director at CURE Niger.
“We are very pleased with the way SATMED is overcoming the barriers often faced in deployment of health services across Africa, where terrestrial infrastructures may be lacking or even non-existent. By combining state-of-the-art satellite connectivity and cloud computing, patients at CURE Niger are now able to be remotely diagnosed by medical experts thousands of miles away. Thanks to satellite technology, we are now in a position to assist in improving both the speed and quality of healthcare services in rural and remote regions, contributing to change on a much wider scale,” said Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, Senior Vice President of SES Commercial in Africa.
