At the Novartis Foundation, our goal is to create greater health equity for as many people as possible. We believe in re-engineering reactive systems of care into proactive, predictive, and preventive systems of health in collaboration with local authorities and partners. Our work is underpinned by the power of data, technology, and AI to create lasting impact.
We create innovative approaches that can address the world’s most burning health challenges: cardiovascular disease and health inequity. Through strong multisector partnerships, we bring these approaches to life, delivering interventions that truly transform population health. All our initiatives are co-created, locally owned, and guided by real-time data while tailored to the needs of the population in focus.
We believe in generating sustainable change at scale, starting with providing robust evidence that informs effective policymaking. We actively share our learnings, data-driven insights, and models to advance global understanding of what truly drives people's health. By doing so, we empower local authorities to prioritize resources and actions that can make a meaningful difference in the lives of a large number of individuals.
Our work is anchored by two pillars: CARDIO4Cities and AI4HealthyCities, supported by global data partnerships for cardiovascular population health and our HealthTech Hub Africa.
Novartis Foundation – Our initiatives
CARDIO4Cities
AI4HealthyCities
Together with city authorities, we co-design and implement solutions to improve cardiovascular population health. We have developed and validated CARDIO4Cities, our evidence-based cardiovascular population health approach, in cities across three continents, working closely with local decision makers. After just 1-2 years of implementation, CARDIO4Cities has shown remarkable success in significantly improving hypertension control, a key risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
We are now working with the cities of São Paulo, Brazil, and Dakar, Senegal, to extend it toward overall cardiovascular risk reduction in urban populations. Encouraged by the robust results of CARDIO4Cities, the Novartis Foundation partnered with IntraHealth International, a global non-profit, to form the CARDIO4Cities Accelerator in 2023. This new organization aims to replicate the successful CARDIO4Cities approach in 30 more cities around the world within 3 years, potentially improving and saving millions of lives.
Cities are facing alarming health challenges and inequities. Yet, data, technology and AI provide unprecedented opportunities for transforming population health and promoting greater equity. Developed with Microsoft AI for Health, AI4HealthyCities applies advanced analytics to a combination of different, fragmented sets of data from the health and health influencing sectors. By doing so, we generate valuable insights about the true drivers of cardiovascular population health and equity. Our goal is to equip decision makers with these insights, enabling them to allocate resources where they are most needed. New York led the way by launching this initiative in 2022, and was joined by Lisbon, Portugal, and Singapore in 2023. In 2024, Helsinki, Finland, and Basel, Switzerland were added to the AI4HealthyCities network.
HealthTech innovation
Global data partnerships for cardiovascular population health
Adressing today’s growing health challenges necessitates innovation in data and technology. HealthTech offers a multitude of benefits, enabling us to enhance both population health and health systems by bringing health services closer to individuals’ daily lives. In collaboration with the Norrsken Foundation, we established the HealthTech Hub Africa (HTHA) in 2021, serving as a pan-African accelerator driving development of health technologies through startups and scaleups on the continent. Since 2021, HTHA has supported 94 organizations across 19 African countries. Startups and scaleups supported benefited over 2.8m people, raised more than USD 15.6m in capital, and created nearly 870 new jobs.
In 2022, we partnered with the Harvard Health System Innovation Lab to leverage data from multiple countries and assess how health system performance impacts cardiovascular population health. The insights gained from this collaboration will complement those delivered by AI4HealthyCities, further advancing a comprehensive understanding of what truly drives people’s health. Ultimately, our aim is to guide the transformation of reactive care systems into proactive, predictive, and preventive health systems that foster the well-being of populations.
