If you can’t bear to buy and wrap one more thing, but you still have someone on your gift list, consider a donation. If the standard charities aren’t your thing, check out these crowdfunding campaigns.
Each one is health-centric and addresses a different need: public art in a hospice, medical education in Mexico, the benefits of exercise for Parkinson’s patients, even better access to medical records. Make a donation in the name of a friend, relative, or colleague and send an email with a link to the campaign that explains what it does and why. Be sure to explain why you chose the donation for this particular person.
All descriptions are from the campaigns and the fundraising totals are current as of Dec. 23.
Better use of mammograms, Send Mammogram – $258 of $30,000 raised
Send Mammogram business method technology is patent pending, and in the baby stages of launching a cloud-based service to empower patients to request their prior mammograms online, before a breast cancer screening or diagnostic mammography appointment. An Internet solution will help accredited mammography departments and facilities obtain prior mammograms faster and more efficiently.
Exercise for Parkinson’s patients, Beneufit – raised $983 of $50,000
Beneufit is a personalized exercise platform for people with major neurological disorders, tapping into the brain’s natural ability to heal itself. The Beneufit platform is designed to empower patient health through exercise.
Our patent-pending technology combines exercise, mobile devices, wireless sensors and analytics with the goal of minimizing the condition’s impact on patients, reducing the costs to society and advancing the understanding of exercise’s impact on the brain. The openness and flexibility of the platform enables researchers to easily test and analyze specific exercise protocols and measure precisely the clinical impact of these protocols.
End-of-life discussions – $1,160 of $15,000 raised
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Consider the Conversation is the project of two filmmakers to document powerful end-of-life stories from patients and doctors about the hope for cure, need for relief and wish for comfort. Consider the Conversation 2: Stories About Cure, Relief, and Comfort is the second chapter in a series of end-of-life care films from Terry Kaldhusdal and Michael Bernhagen.
Public art in a hospice center – 4,061 pounds of 5,000 pounds raised
An artist in Britain wants to shift the way people view medical facilities. He wants to banish the austere and sterile medical environment, transforming the atmosphere to warm and welcoming, humanizing the environment, a concept that is gaining influence in the public art sector. In the past five years, he has been working on a number of public art projects. His focus has been on producing a body of work that is exquisitely detailed so it can be printed up to the size of 20 x 5 meters. These large-scale works have been created with medical environments in mind. This money will go to purchase art for a new hospice center.
Music player for people with dementia, E2L Limited – 800 pounds of 4,600 raised
This British company is raising money for the final push to fund the tooling and working capital for the first production batch of this player. The company became aware of an extensive research project undertaken by the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering which evaluated the concept of a simple-to-use music player, and decided to take on the design and development costs and turn it into a viable product under license. They used the prototype featured in the video for these trials. There are great benefits through providing people with dementia with music they enjoy. Verbal communication is often difficult due to short term memory loss and intellectual effort, but improving the quality of life at home, and avoiding institutional structures, is greatly enhanced by providing music from earlier years. The problem being that many with dementia find the controls difficult to remember or manipulate.
Medical education in Mexico, PACE MD – raised $2,755 of $5,000
PACE MD was the first social impact organization in Mexico to address particular gaps in Mexican healthcare skills and services. It is staffed 100 percent by Mexican citizens, and has a network of hundreds of certified medical instructors. In Mexico, the PACE MD program seeks to improve medical care in areas where mortality rates are high. PACE MD has pioneered different courses in Latin America to provide doctors improved knowledge, skills and abilities.
