Leave No Woman Behind: A Partnership to Reach All Vulnerable Women in Northern Mexico

In 2014, International Community Foundation (ICF), Scripps Health, and Prosalud piloted a  cervical cancer screening program across Mexico to validate new technologies in an effort to help ensure all 48.4 million women at risk for developing cervical cancer - the most common cancer in women aged 15-49 years old - get the preventative care they deserve. While current prevention efforts are far reaching, screening rural and indigenous women continues to be a challenge as a result of the distance to health care centers, awareness, and cultural norms.  

Made possible by a grant from the Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project, the group of diverse partners worked to:

• Increase education, awareness, and engagement with communities in the Baja California region, where incidence remains high.
• To deploy the EVA System in ProSalud’s fully-equipped mobile clinic, eliminating the need for women to have to travel, pay high fees and become educated about cervical cancer prevention.

Over the course of the partnership, 785 women were screened for cervical cancer with the EVA System, an FDA cleared and CE certified mobile colposcope, to reach vulnerable, high-risk women in underserved communities.  Partner staff shared, “For the Community, this was a strong and rewarding program, given the outreach focus. Patients were able to start and conclude successful treatment, after referral to Pro Health Medical Center. Providers who were trained included both medical and social service interns, who were motivated to use to the [EVA System colposcope] because of the training aspect, and engagement of the software in the device.”

A ProSalud community outreach effort, with cervical cancer prevention as part of a broader reproductive health curriculum.

The images collected with the EVA System laid the groundwork for MobileODT’s machine learning and artificial intelligence program that will use algorithms that help identify high-risk patients and provide decision support for any next steps or treatment in the future. 

While we still have much work to do drastically reduce the 5,000 deaths annually from the disease in Mexico, we know that new approaches to ensure no woman is left behind, has the power to help end deaths from cervical cancer in a generation.  

This is a repost with permission from Mobile Optical Technologies (MobileODT) blog. Originally posted 10/15/2017.