Category: Packaging
New white paper spotlights the role of digital tools and adaptive management for navigating complex health challenges
Feb 22, 2021
As the world grappled with the global COVID-19 pandemic, many health professionals and health systems turned to adaptive management to respond to a rapidly evolving situation and its complex challenges. Faced with a strained workforce, supply shortages, and economic losses, adaptive management is an approach that embodies intentional testing and learning to navigate change and uncertainty. It has emerged from the interdisciplinary need and understanding that complex development issues and multi-stakeholder environments require agile solutions.
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Investment in digital health needs careful planning: new WHO guide explains how to do it well
Oct 15, 2020
With the right approach and effective investment, digital health interventions can be successful long-term solutions that help to improve the health and well-being of the people they were designed to reach. A new guide has been launched by WHO to help ensure that digital health investments are effective, sustainable, and equitable – and that they are implemented in a coordinated way and appropriate for the local context. The Digital Implementation Investment Guide has been published by WHO and HRP in collaboration with PATH, UNICEF, and UNFPA.
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The costs of electronic immunization registries, sharing BID’s experience to help other countries plan
Mar 17, 2020
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Case study celebrates lessons and catalytic potential of rapid, iterative software development across three countries
Feb 26, 2020
Pakistan, Zambia, and Kenya are among a growing number of countries implementing electronic immunization registries (EIRs) to improve data quality and health facility performance. But EIRs can be costly to design and introduce. Seeking a solution that had already demonstrated proof of concept, these countries turned to the Open Smart Register Platform (OpenSRP), a mobile health platform based on global standards of care that allows frontline health workers to electronically register and track individuals for immunization.
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Publication round-up: BID publishes new costing data, learnings, and best practices
Dec 3, 2019
The BID Initiative is committed to advancing the global evidence base around data quality and use interventions to improve immunization service delivery. Informed by our own progress in Tanzania and Zambia, we recently published a series of journal articles and publications that demonstrate the impact of electronic immunization registries (EIRs) on cost savings, vaccine stock levels, and data quality, among other areas. This is a round-up of recent publications and some of the learnings from each.
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New Vietnam case study highlights lessons learned around key partnerships with mobile network operators and electronic immunization registries
Oct 18, 2019
The Introducing Digital immunization information systems- Exchange And Learning (IDEAL-VN) project is a PATH-led initiative working to explore and disseminate evidence and lessons learned from Vietnam’s implementation of the, Vietnam’s nationwide electronic immunization registry (EIR), to support successful implementation of EIRs in other countries.
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Aziza Ahmed Seif: Health workers make history as first in Tanzania to retire paper registers
May 30, 2019
In March 2018, Aziza Ahmed Seif and her fellow nurses at the Mikanjuni Health Center in Tanga, Tanzania, made history. They, along with workers at 32 other health facilities in Tanga, retired the thick paper immunization registers they had spent their entire nursing careers using and embraced a digital system that places a universe of data at their fingertips. They traded pen and paper for a tablet framed by colorful data visualizations, swapped crowded tally sheets for a simplified stock management module, and replaced the long evenings of record-keeping that used to characterize immunization clinics with a series of automated reports.
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Dr. Tove Ryman: Digital tools usher in a data revolution for health workers on the front lines
Apr 17, 2019
With the tap of her finger, Neema Temu can easily toggle between two estimates of immunization coverage within her catchment area. A health worker at Monduli Hospital in Arusha, Tanzania, she cheerfully demonstrates her new electronic immunization registry to Dr. Tove Ryman—Senior Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and technical lead of the BID Initiative.
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Dr. Francis Dien Mwansa: EPI manager celebrates ‘my system’ – how country partnerships have defined BID’s success
Feb 19, 2019
In July 2017, the Zambia Ministry of Health (MOH) and the BID Initiative hosted a showcase event to demonstrate the data quality and use interventions that had been collaboratively developed in an iterative process since 2014. During this event, a health worker from Monze in Southern Province shared his experience with data use tools, such as the Zambia Electronic Immunization Registry (ZEIR).
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Matt Berg: The catalytic potential of rapid, iterative software development
Jan 31, 2019
Matt Berg, the CEO of Ona, a Nairobi- and Vermont-based technology company, remembers one of the first immunization clinics he witnessed in Livingstone, Zambia. As a long queue of patients waited to be vaccinated, three health workers and one community health volunteer busied themselves with that day’s work. The community health volunteer weighed children, placing infants into a hanging canvas scale. Two nurses sat at a desk, immunization-related papers fanned out before them. As one pored over a paper registry, the other recorded data on a tally sheet and updated the child’s immunization card. A third nurse administered vaccines inside the clinic.
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