The Russell Berrie Galilee Diabetes SPHERE

Rising to the Northern Challenge

To enable northern cities to protect and serve their residents as Israel faces a multi-front war, SPHERE—Bar-Ilan’s ambitious initiative to move the needle on diabetes in the Galilee—deployed an emergency-response platform that connects all players in a local ecosystem for an optimized health and social-welfare response.

Helping the Helpers

From determining the right areas of focus to assessing a given measure’s efficacy, information is among the key factors in safeguarding towns and cities. Yet with Israel’s north under relentless rocket fire from Hezbollah—and more than 80,000 northern residents forced to flee—the Galilee’s poorest municipalities struggled, in the first weeks of the war, to provide their populations with critical health services on account of information that was fragmented, out-of-date, and incomplete.

 

Fortunately, having already demonstrated the power of leveraging these municipalities’ own resources into a holistic, coordinated response, the Russell Berrie Galilee Diabetes SPHERE knew how to help them rise to the challenge of meeting their residents’ health needs.

Called the Municipal Population Emergency-Management Platform, SPHERE’s emergency tool—rolled out into the region’s weakest communities within just five days of the October 7^th attack—was funded by a generous grant from the Rothschild Foundation and implemented with the help of students from the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine. Using the same methodology SPHERE employs to revolutionize the prevention, control, and care of diabetes, the tool breaks the silos between a municipality’s health, social-welfare, and even business and education sectors by integrating their health and social-welfare data and activities. Then, armed with a full and updated picture of their available health providers, equipment, and priorities, these municipalities’ leaders worked with SPHERE’s team of health professionals and municipal liaisons to design and deliver effective interventions.

In March, Minister of Health Uriel Buso (left) visited Safed to discuss expanding the SPHERE ecosystem model to cities and municipalities throughout Israel, and making its model of diabetes prevention, control, and care a national initiative. Along with SPHERE Director Prof. Naim Shehadeh (center) and SPHERE Deputy Director Sivan Spitzer (right), Buso met with Safed Mayor Yossi Kakon and the SPHERE municipal team.

“I knew the tool was a success when I sat in meetings between municipal leaders and representatives from the Home Front Command, and for the first time, these leaders could provide accurate data about the health equipment and inventory at their disposal and speak from an informed place about what they need,” says SPHERE Deputy Director Dr. Sivan Spitzer, who explained that the project is now entering its second phase: Namely, updating the tool to include more information, and bringing its repository of emergency municipal guidelines online—and into Arabic—for access by the public. “Initially, we thought the challenge was how to work in parallel, providing an acute response on the one hand while advancing SPHERE’s objectives on the other. What we found through our work on this new tool is that the Galilee is not only better prepared to meet health needs in times of war, but is also better equipped to meet health goals in times of relative peace.”

Spheres of Influence

The Municipal Population Emergency-Management Platform’s impact on the Galilee:

+550,000

residents
who benefited

17

Municipalities
that used the platform

Strong Foundations: An Emergency Clinical Infrastructure for Diabetes

Recognizing that the Galilee’s 120,000 diabetics are among the most vulnerable populations in times of emergency, SPHERE build the foundations for a hotline for family doctors in need of diabetes-treatment consultations. Led by SPHERE Director Prof. Naim Shehadeh, President of the Israel Diabetes Association, and staffed by SPHERE’s team of diabetes experts, the hotline is intended to provide front-line health responders with the guidance required to treat the disease under challenging conditions, such as a possible war in the North. SPHERE also developed the infrastructure for a hotline for diabetic patients, staffed by trained representatives from all four of Israel’s HMOs.

Moving the Needle

In 2023, SPHERE advanced the municipal component of its unique ecosystem model in the following key ways:

• Expanding to 17 municipalities, with plans to include 8 more by the end of 2024.
• Mapping all participating municipalities’ health resources and challenges, and writing a strategic plan for each.
• Training all municipalities’ health units, responsible for integrating health-promoting guidelines into municipal services.
• Organizing municipal “health days” to raise awareness of health-promoting services, also in conjunction with local schools.

The following clinical activities empowered SPHERE’s healthcare partners to reduce the Galilee’s rate of diabetes morbidity:

• Launching a diabetologist-training program for the Galilee’s family physicians.
• Launching a training program in obesity prevention for the Galilee’s family physicians, together with the Technion—Israel Institute for Technology.
• Running feasibility studies for preventing the conversion from pre-diabetes to diabetes.
• Opening the North’s first multi-disciplinary obesity clinic in the town of Ramat Yishai, with plans to open four more clinics in the region’s HMOs over the course of 2024.

 

Finally, in May, SPHERE will inaugurate the “one stop shop” Mobile Clinic for diabetes testing, a key to enabling all Galilee diabetics to comply with testing guidelines. The outfitted travelling van, which includes HA1c tests, eye exams, an ultrasound doppler, and an ECG and microalbumin, will also send patient results to their primary-care physicians for use in determining the right treatment.

Northern Lights: Partnership with Denmark

In March, SPHERE was invited to join the Danish Task Force for Chronic Disease, which emphasizes the collection of healthcare data to improve prevention, early detection, treatment, and research. The joint Danish-Israeli team, comprising professionals from both nations, will work in collaboration with the Innovation Foundation in the Region of Zealand (FIERS) and the Denmark Innovation Center in Tel Aviv. The partnership marks a key step on SPHERE’s journey to change the global approach to diabetes prevention and care among low-income populations.