Category: Products
Lessons from the Americas: PAHO launches toolkit for the introduction of electronic immunization registries
Jul 2, 2018
Evidence suggests that electronic immunization registries (EIRs) are cost effective tools that help increase coverage, improve the timeliness of vaccination, provide reliable data for decision-making, and reduce revaccination by helping to verify and track previous immunizations. Developing an EIR, implementing it at the country level, and, above all, ensuring its sustainability are not easy, fast, or inexpensive processes. However, the experience generated by multiple EIR development projects, and the success of some of those programs, can be used as sources of best practices and provide lessons learned. Within this context, Electronic Immunization Registry: Practical Considerations for Planning, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation was developed and published by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in 2017.
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BID joins colleagues from PATH’s Vietnam office to swap experiences about digital registries
Jun 26, 2018
Remain committed to openness. Coordinate with other key initiatives and organizations. Contribute to the body of knowledge that informs future investment. These are just a few of BID’s founding principles, which were manifest last month during a stakeholder meeting in Laos. On May 3, members of PATH’s ImmReg team and the BID Initiative joined a meeting convened by the Ministry of Health (MOH) and National Immunization Program (NIP) of Laos. It brought together key partners working with the government to share, understand, and prioritize the needs of NIP and the MOH regarding the immunization information system. The ImmReg and BID teams shared their lessons learned, challenges and successes with implementing and scaling electronic immunization registries, so that stakeholders and members of government in Laos, who face similar data challenges, could learn from their experiences.
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BID joins other digital initiatives and stakeholders at the ICT4D conference in Lusaka
May 9, 2018
The BID Initiative is headed to the ICT4D conference in Lusaka, Zambia this week for a chance to share and learn from others in the international development community. The conference convenes public, private and civil society organizations from across the international development community, including professionals with backgrounds in health, agriculture, finance, software development and data use and visualization, to name a few. This year, ICT4D is expected to attract more than 600 participants.
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Tanzania’s digital leadership drives partnerships with JSI, others
May 3, 2018
To be truly successful, data quality and use interventions must be scalable and able to be implemented across different settings with different people and partners beyond the BID Initiative. We are pleased to see these partnerships already taking shape with, for instance, the Catholic Medical Mission Board in Zambia’s Western Province, where the country’s electronic immunization registery is now in use in nine health facilities. Most recently, BID has collaborated with John Snow, Inc.’s (JSI) inSupply project to rollout TImR in Dodoma Region.
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Celebrating progress and looking ahead this World Immunization Week
Apr 27, 2018
During a recent visit, Regina Chilekwa, a nurse at Mahatma Gandhi Clinic in Livingstone, Zambia, sat with a patient and talked her through the vaccines her young son needed to keep him protected. Every year, at the end of April, the global health community celebrates World Immunization Week, a chance to spotlight the incredible potential of vaccines, progress toward closing the immunization gap, and advocate for the gains that still must be made. Closing the immunization gap requires all hands-on deck. And while coverage has improved greatly in the last few decades, it has recently stagnated. Twenty percent of children still face barriers to vaccination, ranging from a lack of access to services, to weak health information systems, long travel times between facilities, and vaccine stockouts.
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Success rolls out in Southern Province
Mar 29, 2018
When Fred Njobvu, Provincial Coordinator for the BID Initiative in Zambia, looks back on January 2017, he wasn’t sure how the team would manage to roll out data quality and use interventions to the remaining districts in Southern Province. “We were running out of time in our grant,” remembers Fred, “and we needed to deliver interventions to the rest of the province.”
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Planning for compasses, not maps: BID celebrates a culture of learning, applies principles of adaptive management
Mar 16, 2018
Beatrice Owawa’s fingers dance across the screen of her tablet. She nimbly jumps from one window to the next, as she checks vaccine records and stock levels in the Tanzania Immunization Registry (TImR) at Usa River Health Center in Arusha, where she works as a medical attendant. When Beatrice pulls up a list of young patients who have recently missed their vaccines, she takes down their names and contact information and begins to call their caregivers. It may seem unremarkable, but the task of identifying patients who have fallen through the cracks used to be nearly impossible. Before TImR, Beatrice relied on paper registries to track “defaulters,” or patients who had missed a life-saving vaccine.
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Health workers in Tanzania become data use champions, set national example
Mar 1, 2018
When the BID Initiative first began working in Tanzania to introduce data quality and use interventions alongside the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children (MOHCDGEC), using data was not an everyday practice for most health care workers (HCWs). Many were more excited about the new devices such as the electronic immunization registry, than they were about using this information to improve decision-making. After implementing a change management strategy and thorough training led by district officials, HCWs began to realize the value of using data for decision-making. They began asking: Where do I find all the registered and vaccinated children? What should I do if a child misses a vaccine and I have a red alert on my coverage report? And how do I find children scheduled for vaccination the following month?
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Planning for compasses, not maps: The potential of adaptive management for international development
Feb 23, 2018
International development has historically followed a top-down process that implements a static set of interventions guided by standardized practices, even as programs fail and circumstances change. But progress isn’t always linear. It’s often two steps forward and one step back – and sometimes it moves sideways.
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BID partners with Catholic Medical Mission Board to expand to nine health facilities in Western Province
Feb 16, 2018
The Catholic Medical Mission Board (CMMB) is a charity that has operated in Zambia since 1965 with the specific mandate to deliver sustainable, quality health solutions to women and children. In Zambia, CMMB works in Central, Copperbelt, Luapula, Lusaka, Northwestern and Western provinces under four projects in the health and community development sectors. CMMB’s decision to partner with the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the BID Initiative to roll out the Zambia Electronic Immunisation Registry (ZEIR) to several health facilities in Western Province was a natural extension of its mission to benefit children in the province.
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