Reflections from the inaugural OpenHIE Community Meeting: Learning, sharing, growing, and innovating
Oct 3, 2018
Posted in News, Policies & Practices, Products
Organizing an international five-day meeting for a diverse digital health community is no easy task. There are venues to secure, agendas to develop, and invitation letters to draft. Yet the leaders and innovators of the OpenHIE community were driven to ensure that we all had a place where we could gather to get to know and learn from each other about health information exchange.
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BID launches generic tools to help other likeminded countries implement data quality and use interventions
Sep 14, 2018
Posted in Packaging, Practices
Though data quality and use interventions must be tailored to meet the different needs of countries and health contexts, many implementation tools can be recycled, modified, and reapplied. BID is committed to helping other countries avoid the costly and time-consuming ramp-up often required of projects, and so has developed a generic set of tools based on its experience in Tanzania and Zambia.
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New immunization data reveals state of the field and the important role of data in vaccination
Aug 24, 2018
Posted in Monitoring & Evaluation, News, Policies & Practices
Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) released new immunization data from 2017 that reveals global progress toward immunization targets, and where countries and stakeholders are still falling short. Nine in 10 infants were vaccinated last year, or 123 million babies worldwide. But since 2015, the percentage of children around the world who have received the full three-dose course of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP3), has leveled out at 85 percent. DTP3 is a key indicator of immunization program performance.
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BID analytics: Leveraging data from electronic immunization registries for meaningful insights
Aug 9, 2018
Posted in Monitoring & Evaluation
The electronic immunization registries (EIRs) introduced under the BID Initiative in Tanzania and Zambia have now been scaled to 1,571 health facilities (1,273 in Tanzania; 298 in Zambia). Every day health workers are registering new children into the EIRs and capturing their birth date, their caregiver’s contact information, and the dates they received their last vaccine. More than 467,105 children have been registered into the Tanzania Immunization Registry (TImR) and more than 96,383 children have been registered into the Zambia Electronic Immunization Registry (ZEIR). That’s a lot of data that was previously unavailable above the facility level. But what can we learn from this new information?
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OpenSRP is a 2018 Gavi Pacesetter
Aug 1, 2018
This year keeps delivering exciting news for the OpenSRP community. Last week, OpenSRP was named a Gavi Pacesetter at the annual Gavi INFUSE workshop in San Francisco, California. OpenSRP was one of only four Pacesetters selected from an initial pool of 220 applicants. Gavi Pacesetters are selected for their cutting edge technology and innovative approaches for tackling the challenge of immunization coverage.
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Tanzania and Vietnam forge South-South learning exchange to advance electronic immunization systems
Jul 19, 2018
Posted in People, Practices, Products
Last month, PATH’s Vietnam office and delegates from the country’s Ministry of Health had the opportunity to learn from the BID Initiative in Tanzania. The learning exchange is part of a new South-South partnership forged between two countries implementing electronic immunization registries (EIR). To date, BID and the government of Tanzania have rolled out to four regions, with ten more planned for 2018. In Vietnam, PATH’s pilot EIR, called ImmReg, was first developed and tested in 2012, before expanding into the National Immunization Information System (NIIS), which was launched in 2017. Last month’s visit was a chance to deepen this partnership and trade lessons about the challenges and successes of securing government buy-in and building health system capacity for EIRs.
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The power of knowledge sharing: BID launches encyclopedia of lessons spanning five-year journey
Jul 11, 2018
Posted in News, Packaging, People, Policies & Practices, Practices
Growth and progress are rarely linear. They zig and zag, and at times, for every step forward, there are two steps back. Buoyed by platforms like the BID Learning Network (BLN) and User Advisory Groups, the BID Initiative has embraced adaptive management and iterative, flexible program design that, over the last five years, have translated into many proud wins, some setbacks, and in turn, many lessons learned. In the hopes of sharing these we’ve compiled a comprehensive encyclopedia that documents our learnings throughout every stage of BID’s journey, from the design and testing of data quality and use interventions, on through implementation.
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Lessons from the Americas: PAHO launches toolkit for the introduction of electronic immunization registries
Jul 2, 2018
Posted in News, Packaging, Policies & Practices, Products
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
Posted in People, Policies & Practices, Products
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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Distilling immunization data quality and use evidence
Jun 8, 2018
Posted in General
Over 30 experts in immunization gathered last month in Washington D.C. for the Immunization Data: Evidence for Action (IDEA) project. IDEA’s mission is to systematically synthesize, frame, and share evidence-informed learning and data quality and use best practices that improve immunization outcomes. This workshop was critical in discussing and distilling the evidence and other promising practices into practical and usable learnings that will be shared with the larger community.
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