Category: Policies & Practices
Barcodes: quenching a thirst for data
Oct 29, 2015
You are thirsty and walk into your local corner store to pick up a bottle of water. The clerk scans the barcode on the bottle, announces the price, you pay, leave the store, and drink your water. The story may end there for you, but it is just the start for the data stored in that barcode which is being recorded in the store’s inventory database and communicated to distributors and suppliers across the supply chain.
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Barcodes are beginning to stick
Oct 22, 2015
A mother removes a sticker from her child’s health card. The act in and of itself seems harmless enough, but the motivation at the center of her decision is what the BID Initiative is not only trying to determine, but influence.
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Exciting changes for Mareu Health Facility
Oct 16, 2015
Mareu village is situated 50 kilometers from Arusha town in the King’ori ward. The village is four kilometers from Mareu health center, one of four health centers part of early testing during the BID Initiative’s phase zero. During this phase, interventions were tested and fine-tuned to ensure their relevance and appropriateness for other districts in Tanzania.
Read MoreThe District Weighs in on Data Dashboards
Aug 26, 2015
During a recent trip to Tanzania, I observed firsthand the BID Initiative’s progress in health facilities in and around Arusha. The familiarity nurses had with the newly introduced tablets, their ability to navigate through the electronic immunization registry and the adaptation of their work flow to account for the new technologies, including paper tools, within their health facilities were all highly encouraging. I also heard about some of the existing and new challenges they are experiencing, such as the hesitation of some mothers to affix a barcode to their child’s health card.
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Betting on Better Data
Aug 18, 2015
When you mention innovation, most people immediately think of the latest app that tracks daily life with pinpoint precision, or costly new technologies like Google Glass that just a decade ago would have been considered impossible.
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Health Workers Meet the BID Initiative
Aug 14, 2015
The BID Initiative is rolling out interventions to 253 health facilities in the Arusha region over the course of this year and into early 2016. We have successfully completed the first facility visits in the Arusha City Council district and are now beginning in Meru district. We often get questions on what goes into our site visits and how we practically begin rolling out a comprehensive initiative of this scale.
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Intervention Spotlight: Creating a Data-Use Culture
Jul 29, 2015
The BID Initiative is not a technology or IT project. It’s based on the premise that we must take a holistic approach to the immunization data quality and use challenges countries face through a collection of multiple interventions. The products we are implementing, such as the national electronic immunization registry, will not be successful without additional activities that simplify data flows and reporting, make data accessible across multiple levels of the health system, and cultivate a culture of data use.
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BID Rolls Out in Arusha
Jul 22, 2015
At the end of last month, the BID Initiative officially launched interventions in Arusha, our pilot region in Tanzania! We began with a handful of facilities to user test the new national electronic immunization system and incorporated feedback before expanding to additional facilities. This is a culmination of major efforts in establishing partnerships, identifying the most pressing immunization data-related challenges and fine-tuning interventions to solve them.
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BLN Dives into Logistics Management Information Systems
Jun 11, 2015
The second BID Initiative Learning Network (BLN) Design Collaborative meeting occurred in Dakar, Senegal, during 26-28 May 2015. Sixteen participants with representation of fifteen sub-Saharan African countries attended the meeting and discussed the design, development and implementation of Logistics Management Information Systems (LMIS) within the African context.
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Meet Lucy: A Health Worker’s Job Before and After the BID Initiative
Jun 3, 2015
Meet Lucy. Lucy is a head nurse in a busy, urban facility in Arusha, Tanzania. Like many health workers in Sub-Saharan Africa, Lucy and her colleagues must sift through dense immunization registries to identify kids who need to be immunized. But her job doesn’t stop there. Lucy must also make sure she has enough stock on hand to deliver vaccines and prepare a monthly report for the district.
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