When Will Design Get Serious About Impact?
Dec 22, 2014
A recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review discusses the increasing importance of Human Centered Design in the public sector as well as international development. On the heels of our BID Learning Network Design Collaborative meeting, we couldn’t agree more.
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Testing Interventions in Livingstone
Dec 19, 2014
Posted in People, Policies & Practices, Products
Last month, we joined our colleagues from both the Lusaka and Livingstone offices to visit four health facilities in Livingstone. The purpose of our visits were to test the proposed product vision and change management interventions in the facilities and obtain feedback from health care providers.
Read MoreTanzania UAG – Members Prove their Commitment to the BID Initiative
Dec 17, 2014
Posted in People
The BID Initiative’s User Advisory Group (UAG) plays a critical role in the design, fine-tuning and prioritization of proposed solutions and interventions to improve immunization data quality, collection, and use. The Tanzania UAG recently convened in Arusha to review the testing phase results and discuss lessons learned. The meeting was a success as UAG members expressed their commitments and readiness to the BID Initiative and National Immunization and Vaccination Development Program (IVD) to assure interventions are successfully implemented and sustained.
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Sustainable Impact at Global mHealth Forum
Dec 13, 2014
Posted in General, People, Policies & Practices
If you follow the Potomac River south from Washington, DC, on the Maryland side you’ll come across a large hotel and convention center in National Harbor, MD. Here, the Gaylord National Convention Center is buzzing with the energy of over 500 people from 50 countries who have gathered to share knowledge and experiences around using mobile phones for health impact in low- and middle-income countries.
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UHC and ICT: More than Just Acronyms
Dec 12, 2014
Posted in People, Policies & Practices
Today is the first-ever Universal Health Coverage day and the two-year anniversary of a unanimous United Nations resolution endorsing universal health coverage. Over 500 organizations around the world are working to ensure that “every person, everywhere, has access to health care without financial hardship.”[1]
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Perspectives on the Design Collaborative
Dec 11, 2014
Posted in BID Learning Network (BLN), Practices, Products
Last week’s BLN Design Collaborative brought together health officials from 9 sub-Saharan African countries to discuss and iterate on the design of BID Initiative solutions. The meeting provided a fantastic opportunity for country partners to gather and learn from one another. I personally had the chance to sit down with some of the attendees to discuss challenges related to immunization data in their countries and get their perspective on the value of peer learning and their role in the BLN as a design country.
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Digital Health at Scale: Getting Beyond Pilot Projects
Dec 9, 2014
Posted in People, Practices, Products
It took almost 20 years for barcodes to be fully adopted across the grocery industry. Today they’re in use worldwide, delivering efficiency and automation on a massive scale. It took the efforts of a dedicated visionary to show the impact that a single, universal-sized shipping container would bring to the trucking and freight industry. Today, shippers around the globe can be sure that a standard-sized container will fit on the truck that delivers it to the port in Mombasa and on the truck that unloads it in Seattle.
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A Quiet Revolution: Strengthening the Routine Health Information System in Bangladesh
Dec 4, 2014
Posted in Policies & Practices, Products
The BID Initiative is not designed to create new information system products and solutions. Instead, our aim is to embrace and extend existing systems and investments made by national governments and their cooperating partners wherever possible.
In October, we conducted a webinar on the Electronic Immunization Registry implementation in Albania. Now, we take a look at a publication: A Quiet Revolution: Strengthening the Routine Health Information System in Bangladesh to learn how the Bangladesh Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW) used open source software to enable public health facilities to electronically report routine health information. It is our hope that by learning from what other countries have tested and implemented, we will arrive at a holistic and replicable solution that will result in strengthened immunization systems and overall health outcomes.
Read MoreImportance of Partnerships
Dec 2, 2014
Posted in BID Learning Network (BLN), Monitoring & Evaluation, Products
I recently stopped in Geneva on my way home from visiting the BID Initiative teams in Tanzania and Zambia to meet with important stakeholders at Gavi. While the BID Initiative work primarily focuses on activities in Sub-Saharan Africa with the BID Learning Network (BLN) and in our demonstration countries; , we are also building partnerships with global and bi-lateral agencies like Gavi, WHO, UNICEF, USAID, and others.
Read MoreUsing ICT to Improve Immunization Programs
Nov 26, 2014
Posted in People, Policies & Practices
I was fortunate to be invited to a WHO stakeholder consultation meeting earlier this month in Istanbul. The meeting focused on sharing experiences using information and communication technology to improve immunization programs. In addition, we brainstormed possibilities for future use and introduction of innovation and finally, consulted on the roles that WHO should play to enable adoption of promising technologies, focusing on WHO’s normative function around data standards, as well as on its advisory function concerning use of data, and managing innovation for scalable and sustainable outcomes. Clearly from a BID Initiative perspective, we had a lot to learn and to contribute.
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