Technology adoption in healthcare is slow. One consequence is healthworkers in low-income countries remain ill-equipped to manage stocks of essential drugs. Drug shortages and waste abound. ZiDi™ is a mobile enterprise solution for virtual monitoring and ordering of drugs, even in remote clinics.
WHAT IF:
What if ALL rural clinics were e-linked to preferred drugs suppliers to ensure demand-driven access to safe essential drugs and saved lives?
Website:
http://WWW.MICROCLINICTECH.COMYear Founded:
2012
Public clinics provide 80% of care in Kenya yet are ill-equipped to accurately forecast and efficiently order supplies. Current manual systems favor stockouts, pilferage and waste. Unsustained access to safe drugs enables proliferation of counterfiet drugs. A ubiquitous e-health monitoring system for publicly procured low-cost essential drugs is of great moment, lest the burden of treatable diseases will remain a leading cause of child mortality.
In healthcare people do more of what's INSPECTED and less of what's EXPECTED. Healthworkers equipped with ZiDi™ benefit from real-time clinical decision support to encourage rational drug use; ZiDi™ tracks every drug dispensed and autogenerates a 90-day order form that is visible to approved drug distributors and auditable by health officials. It thereby ensures accountability for publicly procured or donor-subsidized drugs down to the tablet. Nationwide commodity security is thereby attained with virtual audits of facilities to ensure optimal availability of essential supplies and their efficient use. Access to low-cost drugs for malaria, pneumonia and opportunistic diseases can thus be achieved cost-effectively without burdening workers.
In Kenya, health workers in 5,059 government-supported facilities are required to submit orders to the Kenya Medical Supply Authority (KEMSA) quarterly via courrier. The 7-page order-form has 1,440 cells to fill manually. To date, less than 25% of facilities submit their orders on time, if at all. Those received are inaccurate. KEMSA therefore blindly pushes supplies, worth $500 million annually, to the facilities; 10% of which expire; and 75% of facilities report stockouts within 30-days of delivery. With access to ZiDi™, KEMSA is able to tailor its supply to a facility based on actual need. Once scaled-up nationwide, KEMSA projects over $50 million in savings annually from rational drug distribution and use.
Imagine if we saved every rural citizen in Kenya, i.e., approximately 78 percent of the 43.3 million inhabitants , ONE DOLLAR PER YEAR by improving the distribution of and access to ALL subsidized essential drugs. That would result in $33.73 million in retained income for those rural households.
Each dollar saved can purchase one liter of milk and a 500g loaf of bread, 1 Kg of potato, 2 Kg of maize or wheat flour, 23 cellular phone minutes or 3 months worth of chlorine to disinfect drinking water. Thus, access to drugs can have a profound impact on the social welfare of rural populations. Our vision is to improve the distribution of ALL free or subsidized essential drugs to rural dispensaries in Kenya to impact health and poverty.
Our sustainability is anchored on strategic partnerships and scale. We have partnered with KEMSA, Microsoft, Yahsat, and Mastek to ensure ZiDi™ is accessible at the lowest cost possible. Our partners have enabled us build capacity with minimal cost. We plan to scale to a minimum of 250 sites in 2014 through consultancies and operational research grants, pending a nationwide government-sponsored rollout with minimal debt financing.
Numerous donor-funded project have developed tracking systems for specific commodities. E.g., PharmaAccess' focus is on HIV medication; others on family planning supplies. DHIS2 is only for disseminating health indicators. These require manual transcription of data from paper records. Numerous SMS solutions also exist to track counterfiets. However SMS systems requires high levels of literacy & numeracy, and tend not to be integrated to national systems. ZiDi™ is connected to KEMSA's systems and tracks ALL essential commodities in real-time as prescribed without the need to transcribe data.
A partnership with KEMSA will ensure nationwide adoption of ZiDi™ and the opportunity for mobile technology to fundamentally transform health service delivery in Kenya. The promise of ZiDi™ is 3-fold: i) improve accountability for drug-use to eliminate waste, pilferage, irrational use and counterfiets; ii) lower the cost of M&E, a large component of health programs; iii) minimize out-of-pocket expenditure on drugs at the bottom of the pyramid. We estimate Kenya's rural homesteads would save a minimum of $33 million each year if essential drugs are adequately stocked in public clinics.
Not featured
I accept these conditions