Oral Presentations

The German-Austrian research project NutriSafe develops technologies to increase the resilience of food supply chains by using innovative Distributed Ledger Technologies, aka Blockchain. Universities and research institutions, private companies, and public authorities form the research consortium. Two scenarios guide NutriSafe: The German consortium considers food supply and logistics with small and medium crises mainly on food safety while the Austrian consortium deals with more massive crises in food security with the need for intervention by public authorities. All results of NutriSafe are made available in the NutriSafe toolkit under an open-source license.NutriSafe´s Distributed Ledger Technologies facilitates transparency by sharing information across the supply chain and agile responses through an open architecture that allows us to add data and actors on-demand in crises. Digital and real-time tracking & tracing enable agile responses in food safety and are the basis for effective interventions in major food supply crises solutions. 

NutriSafe´s results include Distributed Ledger Technologies for information sharing, (mobile) clients to connect to the distributed ledger infrastructure, services for the management of supply chains and food supply, simulations and serious games as means for analysis of security and resilience, considerations on information security and privacy, as well as business models for a resilient food supply chain: supply boxes, scanner check-outs, and secure elements are technologies for a fully digital supply chain with innovations for payments, information flows and food supply for more resilience in the food supply.

To address the challenges associated with retaining trained and qualified health systems staff in Benin, the USAID Global Health Supply Chain-Technical Assistance Francophone Task Order (GHSC-TA Francophone TO) project, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health (MoH), launched the Young Logistician Professionals Program (YLPP) in 2018. YLPP recruits and trains young professionals to manage and monitor the health commodity supply chain at the community-level, which has resulted in the enhanced mitigation of stockouts and expiries while expanding youth capacity in supply chain logistics. To date, 30 YLPs have been recruited and trained in supply chain management best practices and deployed across Benin to assist with commodity management and reception of donated goods

Presentation covers challenges involved in building Sustainable & Resilient Cold Chain, needed for delivering Covid-19 vaccine ensuring, its safety as well as Potency….

The views are there, towards making the strategic planning, in consideration to development of cold chain action plan, rationale distribution system with sustainable delivery mechanism.

In addition to this, presentation covers use of novel cold chain technologies in cold chain emphasizing energy saving measures/environmentally friendly solutions…

What information about your organization would you want to monitor, analyze, and share? Digital dashboards allow us to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important metrics in the interest of improving our work and making better decisions. If set up well, they can also allow us to easily generate reports without all the hours and days of prep work. In this session we will present how to set up a dynamic digital dashboard using Google Sheets and Google Data Studio, both of which are free and easy to use.

The authors will describe a foundational disease model to project infectious diseases across a network. They will outline example results on the impact of operational or policy decisions such as the wearing of mask, distancing policies, voluntary quarantining, or others.

The conventional wisdom suggests that donors support charities with lower overhead cost ratios. Yet, these metrics may discourage necessary investments in organizational and operational infrastructure. Our empirical study shows that donors are willing to accept higher overhead costs of HOs that demonstrate greater degrees of accountability.

Multi-month dispensing (MMD) allows HIV/AIDS patients to receive several months of antiretroviral (ARV) supply at once, improving adherence and reducing cost to facilities and patients. Because of these benefits, many countries started scaling up MMD for ARVs in 2019 with support from the USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project. COVID-19 has imposed a need to accelerate MMD to reduce clinic visits and minimize exposure. Since dispensing decisions have profound effects on the supply chain, GHSC-PSM is supporting MMD scale-up in multiple countries and advising clinical partners on the challenges of an abrupt MMD scale-up. This includes managing multiple bottle sizes and an artificial "seasonal" demand pattern that could result in stockouts and high fluctuations in patient visits between months. Implementing MMD requires careful planning and policy development.
GHSC-PSM has supported government stakeholders, clinical partners and donors by providing MMD resources that allow countries to make data-driven decisions and manage supply chain constraints. The GHSC-PSM-developed Multi-Month Simulation (MuMS) tool for scenario planning facilitates data-driven conversations with local and international stakeholders on the feasibility of rolling out MMD for 3-6 months. The tool uses existing data and makes broad assumptions to model the potential effects of increasing the quantity given to each patient on current and future stock status.
Resources like MuMS and other rapid scenario planning tools can improve communication and decision-making between supply chain and clinical stakeholders to ensure commodity availability during COVID-19. In coming months, GHSC-PSM will continue to share and improve the tool.
 

IMPACT teams have been implemented across 17 counties in Kenya and 10 countries globally. To enhance uptake, ownership and institutionalize the approach, inSupply Health deployed a dual strategy of human centered design to co-create solutions and adaptive learning for continuous improvement. Based on insights from both processes identifying capacity building in effective data use as a motivator and a gap, inSupply created 7 IT role profiles and related virtual learning packages covering technical, leadership and behavioral competencies required to run effective ITs. ITs have adopted virtual meetings and learning to enhancing their competencies and performance in providing essential health services.

The Democratic Republic of Congo relies on donor support to cover pharmaceutical needs as minimal data and an unreliable logistics management information system (LMIS) negatively impacts supply chain managers' decision making abilities. Although the country's district health information system (DHIS-2) implementation captures patient data and indicators, it does not capture all commodity data and transactions. In 2018, USAID’s Global Health Supply Chain-Technical Assistance (GHSC-TA) Francophone TO project supported the Ministry of Health in the acquisition of InfoMED, a comprehensive LMIS for commodity management which captures patient data and triangulates it with data on drug availability. By ensuring interoperability with DHIS-2, InfoMED builds on previous investments and supports commodity availability, especially during emergencies like COVID-19.

To meet the rising global needs, the humanitarian community has signed off on making a strategic change toward more localisation – which commonly refers to the inclusion and empowerment of national and local actors in humanitarian assistance. To enhance understanding of the phenomenon, we have conducted an exploratory study on localisation of logistics preparedness capacities and obstacles to its implementation. We particularly focused on the perspective of the international humanitarian organisation (IHO) community as they are expected to implement the localisation strategy. Particularly, we find that it is not clear what is meant by localisation with confusion between strengthening external actors and internal national/local offices.

Many low- to middle-income countries lack a professionalized supply chain occupational category, formed either via formal education or through the civil service structure. This professionalization is critical to embedding a workforce with specific supply chain competencies in the health system. Without trained professionals to manage health supply chains, drugs and supplies do not reach the patients who need them. The People that Deliver (PtD) Supply Chain Management (SCM) Professionalization Framework is a systematic approach to workforce development, where all practitioners are able to find a career path for growth and development, allowing supply chain professionals to lead and operationalize public healthcare supply chains and achieve country and organizational objectives.

Material convergence, also known as unsolicited in-kind donations, poses significant challenges during disasters. This paper is the first to map the feedback processes influencing the overall dynamics and to offer a comprehensive analysis of how multiple policies affect the system based on system dynamics. Our analyses show that the unintended consequences of some policies trump their intended rationality, leading to undesirable outcomes. Four policies perform consistently better regardless of disaster characteristics (dispersion and forecastability) or the loci of decisions: admission control, donor education, pre-positioning, and quantity of human resources.

With the world’s pharmaceutical companies—and universities and research organizations—all working to protect people against the COVID-19 pandemic, it is likely that there will be multiple COVID-19 vaccines that will reach domestic and international markets. But the development of the vaccines is only the first step in protecting people. Supplying and delivering any new vaccine into a country—and to the population—involve complex processes. This session will review six key lessons learned from previous new vaccine introductions that bring together the supply chain and program perspectives.

The introduction of new technical innovations in the public health sector has resulted in many siloed and unadopted solutions, such as online dashboards, due to a lack of advocacy around building the capacity of the countries to manage their own data systems. We see education and advocacy around this topic as very crucial for the whole sector. This is to ensure that countries know their rights and make their own decisions when it comes to data management.  Nexleaf Analytics will hold a session to inform audiences about different aspects of data management and ownership.

In the constantly evolving humanitarian sector, many International Humanitarian Organizations are currently seeking for interoperability in response to the sector’s urge for professionalization and ERP implementations, inter-NGO collaboration, and private sector partnerships. Since standardization is the necessary premise to interoperability, the Frontline Humanitarian Logistics initiative was created to reduce the time and cost involved in implementing IT solutions within humanitarian supply chains and encourage interoperability of systems across the sector. A common Humanitarian Logistics Process Framework (HLPF) was developed based on the extensive analysis of logistics processes of 7 INGOs, refined through a three-round Delphi study with 15 experts of INGOs, and validated by 19 INGOs. The proposed HLPF constitutes a reference model for inter-NGO collaboration through data exchange and process alignment, improves communication and allows data and software interoperability between private sector solutions and humanitarian needs.

Following a decade of work by the Government of Pakistan in collaboration with its international and in-country partners, the national Logistics Management Information System (LMIS) has flourished to become a well-managed yet comprehensive database for informed health decision-making. The maturity of Pakistan’s LMIS allowed for rapid response and allocation of critical health commodities when faced with the global pandemic, COVID-19. Using advanced business intelligence and machine learning tools, data from across the country could be aggregated and analyzed quickly to ensure emergency supplies could be provided to citizens when and where they were needed. With support from the USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management project, Pakistan has enhanced visibility and resilience across its supply chain, and is primed for self-reliance.