BID by the numbers: New data reveals time-savings, more empowered decision-making among health workers
Nov 29, 2018
Posted in Monitoring & Evaluation, People, Policies & Practices, Products
Beatrice Owawa is a Reproductive and Child Health nurse at the Usa River Health Center in Tanzania, one of more than 1,500 health facilities implementing data quality and use interventions across Tanzania and Zambia in partnership with the BID Initiative. As she toggles between dashboards on her tablet, you would never know it, but Beatrice used to depend on pen and paper for documenting her facility’s immunization clinics.
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Dr. Eddie Mukooyo: BID Learning Network member recounts camaraderie, opportunity of peer learning
Nov 27, 2018
Posted in Packaging, People, Policies & Practices, Products
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is how Dr. Eddie Mukooyo Sefuluya, a BID Learning Network (BLN) member and Chairperson for the Uganda AIDS Commission, describes the peer learning network that for the last five years has tackled some of the most complex challenges facing health information systems—and developed its most promising solutions. The BLN comprises more than 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. With conversation topics ranging from the design of patient registers to community-based early warning systems for Ebola outbreaks, the BLN allows participants to connect, learn, and collaborate in ways that advance their own discrete efforts, while also accelerating the pace of progress for all.
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BID Story launches celebrating the transformative power of data and country ownership
Nov 14, 2018
Posted in News, People, Policies & Practices, Products
Five years. Two electronic immunization registries (EIRs). Nineteen design countries who regularly input to the BID Learning Network. Study visits to Benin and Chile to learn from others implementing health information systems. More than half a million children registered in both EIRs, and 1,580 health facilities implementing data quality and use interventions, allowing health workers to collect, analyze, and act upon immunization data in real time.
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Good data saves lives: How digital record-keeping is helping transform immunisation in Tanzania
Oct 25, 2018
Posted in News, People, Policies & Practices, Practices
In the harsh, dry highland plains of the Ngorongoro region of Tanzania stands a small red tent – a tiny speck of colour in an otherwise dusty, lifeless landscape. It can be seen from several kilometres away, and that is precisely the point. Because even before Bakari Shemagembe, the local Assistant Medical Officer, and his team have finished setting up around the tent, the local Maasai tribespeople start to arrive, trickling in from all directions, drawn towards this beacon.
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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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