Long Covid & ME/CFS

A care program for your way forward.

Sharpa offers patients and their caregivers an integrated program for the assessment and therapy of Long Covid and ME/CFS. Adapted to their energy limits, with specialised partner physicians working from the latest scientific evidence, and with one dedicated contact.

Start here

Your way into the program

How we try to give you clarity and a way forward.

Your situation

You suspect Long Covid or ME/CFS but have no diagnosis.

How we help

A specialised partner physician assesses whether Long Covid or ME/CFS is present. You complete the assessments this requires gently, from home.

Go to the assessment

Your situation

You have a diagnosis of Long Covid or ME/CFS, but still lack a real therapy plan.

How we help

A specialised partner physician develops a therapy plan for you. You complete the assessments this requires gently, from home.

Go to therapy planning
Forest paths disappearing into morning fog — no orientation.

The challenge

Long Covid meets a healthcare system that isn't prepared for it.

No clear path

There is no clarity around diagnostics and therapy. Patients drift between GPs, specialists, and waiting lists — without anyone offering a coherent diagnostic and therapeutic pathway.

Care that makes you sicker

The trip to the practice alone can trigger Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM) — significantly worsening the patient's state. The healthcare system demands activity; the illness forbids it.

Fragmented care

Immunologist, neurologist, cardiologist — each sees a fragment. Findings sit in different practices, in different formats. No one assembles the full picture.

Financial burden

Health insurers currently cover almost no costs. Reimbursement options are little known, and the path to coverage is complex. Patients and their families largely carry the financial burden alone.

Caregivers at their limit

Those who coordinate, research, and care carry an enormous burden — often alongside their own job and family. The healthcare system neither sees nor addresses their exhaustion.

Our role

Sharpa builds the care pathway that doesn't yet exist.

Long Covid is a systemic illness — but care is fragmented. Sharpa connects diagnostics, medical consultation, and therapy into one coherent, coordinated process: from at-home blood draws to telemedical consultations with specialised partner physicians, all the way to scheduling therapy and rehabilitation.

Given the substantial overlap in disease mechanisms and symptoms, Sharpa is also relevant for people with ME/CFS — even when the illness is not connected to a SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID vaccination.

Sharpa does not provide therapy itself. The medical decision lies with the physician. Sharpa ensures that the physician enters every consultation prepared and with the necessary information — and that you don't have to manage logistics, gathering findings, or coordinating appointments.

Hands gripping a rope — secured on the path.
The name Sharpa comes from the Nepali Shar Pa: someone who carries the load on the way to the summit and knows the path.

Our structure

Three aspects are especially important in our program.

Pacing First

Telemedicine, local partners and digital technologies enable diagnostics and therapy without unnecessary crash risk.

One point of contact

An integrated program for orientation and for organising every step from diagnostics to therapy, all from a single source.

Innovative therapy platform

Experienced partner physicians, consideration of current research and our own research study for phenotype-based therapy (REALME).

Our REALME study

We're bringing patients' lived experience into therapy research.

Anyone living with Long Covid or ME/CFS builds up years of first-hand knowledge about what helps and what doesn't. In research terms, this kind of information is called Real World Evidence.

In the US, researchers from Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine showed what this can lead to: 3,925 patients rated more than 150 therapies, published in 2025 in PNAS. With our REALME study, we want to bring this approach to Europe and contribute to the development of therapy for Long Covid and ME/CFS.

Taking part is anonymous and pacing-friendly. The findings will be published openly and free of charge.

More about the REALME study →

“…insights from patient-reported experiences provide urgently needed real-world evidence for developing targeted patient care therapies and future clinical trials.”
Eckey et al., “Patient-reported treatment outcomes in ME/CFS and long COVID”, PNAS 2025 (TREATME study)

For caregivers

You carry too. We see that.

"I don't know what to do, and I'm afraid we won't make it."

Those who care, coordinate, and organise stay invisible to the healthcare system. Sharpa is here for you too — not as an attachment, but as your own agent.

Sharpa takes over scheduling with physicians and therapy facilities, the consolidation of findings, and communication with the care network. If the patient cannot use the service themselves, Sharpa supports you in arranging all the necessary steps on their behalf.

A hand on a doorknob, a darkened room behind it.

Frequently asked

Our answers.

Sharpa is a coordination and support care program for people with Long Covid and ME/CFS. We organise the path from diagnostics to therapy — at home, with one dedicated contact, at the patient's own pace. Sharpa is not a medical provider and does not perform therapies itself.

The diagnostic assessment costs CHF 350, the therapy planning CHF 455. This includes the partner physician's fee. Two invoices are issued: one for the partner physician and one for Sharpa. Both invoices must be settled before the assessment dossier is prepared and the teleconsultation takes place.

If further assessments (for example, laboratory diagnostics) are needed to establish a diagnosis or the therapy plan, the partner physician will point these out to you and Sharpa will send you a cost overview. These costs are then charged additionally and separately. Sharpa can take care of organising these further assessments. The diagnosis or therapy plan is updated at no extra cost once the assessment results are available.

Based on the therapy plan, Sharpa will prepare an implementation plan and a cost overview. Therapy costs are then charged additionally when therapy begins.

In principle, you should expect that costs currently have to be borne privately. On request, Sharpa prepares a reimbursement dossier intended to improve the chances of cost coverage by your insurer.

Yes. Given the substantial overlap in disease mechanisms and symptoms, we view ME/CFS as a severe expression of Long Covid. From our perspective, our care pathway and treatment principles are also relevant for ME/CFS.

Your data — including the information from your health questionnaire — is processed in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (revFADP). We treat questionnaire responses as special category personal data within the meaning of Art. 9 GDPR and Art. 5 lit. c revFADP.

In concrete terms:

  • Storage in Switzerland: Your account, your profile details and your health questionnaire responses are stored in an encrypted database in Zurich.
  • Processing in the EU: The application that receives and processes your input runs on a server in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) — within the European legal area.
  • Encrypted transmission: All communication between your browser and our systems takes place exclusively over TLS-encrypted connections.
  • Strict access control: Only a narrowly limited group of Sharpa staff has access to your data — solely within the scope of the service you have requested.

Sharpa is currently active only in Switzerland. However, we plan to operate outside Switzerland soon. We therefore recommend registering for the program now, so that we know where we can help and can then keep you informed. Register for the assessment

Contact

Questions? We're here for you.

Email: info@sharpa.health