Technology adoption in healthcare is slow. One consequence is clinics in low-income countries remain ill-equipped to manage stocks of essential drugs. Drug shortages and waste abound. ZiDi™ is a mobile solution for virtual monitoring and ordering of drugs, even in remote clinics.
About You
About You
First Name
Hoffman Moka
Last Name
Lantum
Twitter URL
Facebook URL
LinkedIn URL
About Your Organization
Organization Name
MicroClinic Technologies Ltd.
Organization Website
Organization Country
Kenya
Country where this project is creating social impact
Kenya, NAIROBI
Is your organization a
For‐profit
Current annual budget, in US dollars (if your solution is an idea please estimate what your budget will need to be in order to carry out your solution)
$100,000‐250,000
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Project
Name Your Entry
Closing the loop of essential drugs down to the last mile
Year founded
2012
Stage: Select the description below that best applies to your solution.
Growth (your pilot is up and running, and starting to expand)
Elevator Pitch
Technology adoption in healthcare is slow. One consequence is clinics in low-income countries remain ill-equipped to manage stocks of essential drugs. Drug shortages and waste abound. ZiDi™ is a mobile solution for virtual monitoring and ordering of drugs, even in remote clinics.
Inspiration: What's one way your project dares to ask, "WHAT IF?"
What if ALL rural clinics were e-linked to drugs suppliers to ensure access to safe essential drugs for the poor?
Problem: What problem is this project trying to solve?
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.
Solution: What is the proposed solution? Please be specific!
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.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Impact
Example: Walk us through a specific example of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
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.
Impact: What is the impact of the work to date?
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.
Full Impact Potential: What are the main spread strategies moving forward? (Please consider geographic spread, policy reform, and independent replication/adoption of the idea or other mechanisms.)
We will grow ZiDi™ in the public and private sector of East Africa. Our public sector strategy seeks to establish public private partnerships that include drug distributors, the Ministry of Health and funders. Our private sector strategy strives to establish partnership with large provider networks interested in a uniform platform for their clinics. We also seek partnerships with large drug suppliers & manufacturers. These partnerships will ensure access to ZiDi™ is partially subsidized for public and private providers in East Africa in exchange for data. MoH Kenya & KEMSA are onboard.
Barriers: What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
We anticipate 3 main barriers . 1) the status quo, notably, health workers reselling KEMSA drugs at the expense of the public and inherent competition from suppliers of paper registers who opt for current manual systems and resist change. 2) a high upfront investment in satellite connectivity and tablets is required for ZiDi™ to operate. This minimizes uptake of ZiDi™ by small private clinics. 3) Government financing is needed for scale-up. This is subject to legislative approval that could slow nationwide adoption of ZiDi™. Current buy-in from the Ministry of Health dwarfs these barriers.
Sustainability
Founding Story: Share a story about the "Aha!" moment that led the founder to get started and/or to see the potential for this to succeed.
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.
Partnerships: Tell us about your partnerships.
We have established partnerships with KEMSA, Microsoft, Yahsat, and Mastek and hope to formalize a public private partnership with the Ministry of Health in 2014. KEMSA grants us access to their enterprise resource planning system. Microsoft provides low-cost cloud services and supports the Windows 8 version of ZiDi™. Yahsat gives us premium rates for satellite connectivity. Mastek provides low cost tablets.
Closing the Loop
How does your project primarily ensure that feedback delivers results?
Help funders, governments, and other organizations to listen to and act on feedback.
Please elaborate on your answer to the above question.
Quantification and forecasting of WHO-recommended essential commodities is an essential fuction of public health systems, requiring collective input from the Ministry of Health (MoH), funders and service providers. Data on national stock levels on essential drugs are currently untimely or unavailable. KEMSA, MoH and funders use disparate data to allocate resources; clinics end-up over- or under-stocked, even for basic items like antimalarials. ZiDi™ tracks inventory of every commodity in real-time for easy access online. It thus ensures that shared decision-making by stakeholders is seamless.
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the same problem? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
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. I
Languages: In what languages are you able to read and write fluently?
English, French.