Zambia And IBM To Provide Increased Access To Life Saving Drugs

IBM has announced a collaboration with Zambia’s Ministry of Health to provide citizens with better access to 200 lifesaving drugs.  The project, which begins in May with a 12-month trial, will free up health facility staff from providing detailed paper stock inventories, allowing them to provide meaningful health care.

Zambia’s Medical Stores Limited (MSL) has the support of the UNICEF, and London Business School, World Bank and Department for International Development (DFID). With the level of support it has, MSL will therefore establish a new medical supply chain trial with the use of sophisticated technologies to manage both delivery and inventory of medicine.

“With help from our partners, we have already introduced simple improvements in the medical supply chain that will save the lives of thousands of children across our country by 2015,” said Dr. Bonface Fundafunda, CEO at MSL.  According to him, MSL is collaborating with IBM to replace its inventory system, which is paper-based with cutting-edge technology that can pinpoint the exact locations where stocks of essential medicines are running dangerously low.”  About 100,000 deaths are registered by the Zambia’s public health sector annually due to treatable and preventable diseases.

The Ministry of Health is therefore introducing innovative technology to manage a supply chain sufficient enough to meet increased demand, and control the usage, supply, availability and access to essential medicine within the Zambian health sector.  “Zambia is taking a strong action to prevent avoidable deaths by testing and deploying new methods to get drugs to people on time,” said John Makumba, operations officer, Africa Health Unit at the World Bank.

He added that although supply chains seem insignificant as they are invisible and low profile, but when they don’t work, terrible consequences follow.  The program will therefore leverage IBM’s ILOG optimization technology to calculate the ideal composition of drug shipments based on available inventory, resources and historical usage; a system, whose transparency means each district in the Southern African country will have a real time view of drug stock levels at the clinics and the ability to coordinate the transfer of supplies from one facility to another if required.

A similar project has been completed in Tanzania, aimed at reducing the number of malaria deaths in the East African country.  The solution tagged “SMS for Life”, was tried successfully in approximately 135 villages in remote regions and had since been rolled out successfully across Tanzania.

The IBM Analytics and mobile solution is expected to provide a real-time view of drug usage and stock while also analyzing data to identify trends and forecasts necessary to prevent gaps in the medical supply chain.  The goal of the medicine supply chain management project is to save more lives by making medicine widely available when and where it’s needed.

Copyright Venutres Africa 2014