Hikma Health: What’s in a name?
Hikma حكمة (n.) — healing wisdom
In Arabic, the word hikma means wisdom, derived from the quality possessed by the traditional medicinal healers in Arab societies, called hakims. Hikma Health is founded on this timeless philosophy of empowering hakims with the healing wisdom, information, and knowledge that they need to treat those in need. Our mission at Hikma is to provide physicians and care providers around the world with the data resources they need to achieve the best possible health outcomes for their patients and communities.
Hikma Health was launched out of the MIT Media Lab’s Refugee Learning Accelerator, where our conversations with refugee patients and physicians illuminated the vital need for accurate data collection and patient monitoring to treat chronic illnesses. Furthermore, we identified the opportunity to build personalized predictive models using the collected data in order to support clinical decision making to elevate the standard of care. Our solution is to create custom health data management systems designed to record, access, and analyze patient data for nonprofit organizations working with refugees and other underserved populations.
Since its founding in August 2018, Hikma has grown into a volunteer-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of over 30 people, with additional support from professional software engineers. Volunteers range from physicians to consultants, software engineers to educators — all dedicating their time and talent to create a unique, yet practical health data system for refugee patients. Hikma is funded solely by donations, philanthropy, and partnerships. 100% of donations go directly to cover product development costs, including server costs and engineer salaries.
In the last six months, we have built the fully-featured Hikma cloud platform customized to the needs of our clinical partners. The Hikma health data system is tailored to the complex setting of refugee healthcare, providing functionality such as online-offline capability and multilingual datastreams. We aim to improve outcomes for patients by using data from consented patients to construct predictive models for them which will ultimately support clinical decision making. We are currently working to deploy the system for for clinical organizations around the world. Once our system is in widespread continuous use, it will improve health outcomes for refugee patients, particularly those with major chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that are significantly under-treated in refugee populations.
Hikma Health is purpose driven, patient centered, leading with compassion and healing wisdom. We look forward to building a healthier future for patients around the world!
Hikma Health is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit and is not affiliated with Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC or any of its affiliates.