Sandoz, the Novartis generic and biosimilar pharmaceutical division, announces the launch of Sandoz HACk - Healthcare Access Challenge - a global competition to generate innovative ideas and solutions to help tackle some of the world's most pressing healthcare access problems. The competition is open for entries until November 30, 2016.

"There are numerous challenges that impact healthcare in a country like India and we need to collaborate with all stakeholders to improve health access," said Jawed Zia, Country President, Novartis India. "The launch of Sandoz HACk is one of the ways we want to identify and then foster creative ideas from countries like India."

Despite the significant advances made in modern medicine, more than two billion people worldwide cannot access the medicines they need and more than 400 million lack access to essential health services.1 The combined efforts of stakeholders across both public and private sectors, including the pharmaceutical industry, not-for-profit organizations and governments have made significant advances in tackling healthcare access challenges worldwide. But these large scale systemic initiatives need to be supported by community-led change, driven by innovative small scale solutions that can make a big difference. Therefore, Sandoz HACk has been launched, inviting people to generate novel solutions to tackle key healthcare access challenges in local communities.

Mobile technology is radically altering how care is delivered and received worldwide and the influence of mobile in healthcare is likely to continue evolving in the future. In its inaugural year, Sandoz HACk encourages today's generation of entrepreneurs and creative thinkers to enter ideas that harness mobile health technologies - M-Health - to help solve relevant local healthcare access challenges.

Sandoz HACk is open for entries from 18-35 year olds around the world. Following a robust judging process, the six finalist entries will be published on OpenIDEO - a global community of leading organizations and individuals working together to design solutions to the world's biggest challenges. Entrants' ideas will be refined and evolved in partnership with this online community before being presented to a panel of judges. Three winners will be chosen and awarded seed funding and mentorship to help bring their ideas to life.

For details, please visit: www.sandoz.com/makingaccesshappen and www.facebook.com/sandozglobal