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Teach to Reach (English)
#TeachToReach Partner eHealth Africa and EHA Clinics: Digital health solutions for health
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- [00:03]
Rita
E Health Africa, together with EHA Clinics. And we're of course discussing climate change impacts on health as well as immunization. In just one hour and a half, we'll be having what I think will be what feels like is going to be an historic session on celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Expanded Program on Immunization with eHealth Africa and EHA clinics. We're going to discuss empowering health with data driven local solutions. We're just going to go check the schedule to see so you can see too where we are at. And this is what we call the partner showcase with eHealth Africa and EHA clinics. So we're going to explore this potential of digital health solutions to address community health challenges. And we have some distinguished guests. I'm going to turn this time to Maria to pull David Akban and Abdul Hamid Yahya into the panel so that they may participate. Yes. Okay. And they're already there. All right, wonderful. So we're very pleased to share, to announce and share this partnership with eHealth Africa. We had already quite a lively and exciting lightning chat with David Akpan, who's the deputy director at eHealth Africa. We're going to dive right in as we do with an introduction. David.
- [01:25]
David Akpan
Yeah, thanks, Reddit. I hope I'm loud enough. Yes, excellent. So thanks, it's a pleasure being here and thanks for having us again on this particular edition of teach to reach 10. So thank you so much. Just like we have scheduled and lined up of conversation to make, we're basically going to be showcasing some digital solution that really is going to help empower health care workers because this is what the platform is all about. It's to make and improve the way healthcare workers very prominent set of people, how they get to offer services and also make the work more efficiently delivered. So on the call today, I have, my colleague is also a deputy director at HE Health Africa. His name is Duhamid Yahya. So he's going to take us through the presentation today in a short while. So over to you, Abdul Hamid. Thank you.
- [02:29]
Rita
All right, Abdul Hamid.
- [02:30]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much, David. And thank you to the tdlf. I think it's a wonderful opportunity to be on this platform. It's quite an honor. It's a little bit noisy where I am, so I'll try to speak loud so that maybe that can overshadow any noise or background sound that you might hear. Yeah. So thank you very much once again, just like with David, as alluded to. So the topic today is to talk about digital solutions that are helping to respond to public health and also to strengthen health systems. So today we're talking about a specific solution which is Lomis Stalker. Lomis deliver applications that has helped over time for to solve some of the routine immunization challenges we have in Nigeria. So is someone. Okay, the slides are already shared, so can we go to the next slide please?
- [03:30]
Rita
Yes. We're actually going to do this a little bit differently. Thanks Maria, for being right on the job. What we're going to do is actually share here, let me just. If you could stop sharing your screen and then we'll go right into it. Yeah, great. All right. And Abdul Hamid, before we dive into this digital solutions, can you briefly, or perhaps with David, either of you briefly introduce Ehealth Africa for those who do not yet know of your organization and tell us also why you've chosen to partner for teach to reach and what your experience has been so far.
- [04:10]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
I think I'll defer that to you.
- [04:12]
David Akpan
Yeah, yeah, great. Thanks Rada. I mean we can't stop talking about E Health Africa as far as Teacherish10 is concerned. Yeah. So E Health Africa, it's an international organization, it's a non profit organization that we proud ourselves around using digital technology to improve public to improve public health or health response. That includes even the use of data solution digital innovation that cuts across different areas of healthcare and clear our work and our program area of focus is around public health, emergency management, disease prevention and monitoring, lab systems and.
- [05:04]
Rita
All right, it looks like we have a glitch in David's presentation.
- [05:09]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
Unfortunately I can take over quickly.
- [05:11]
Rita
All right, go ahead, Abdul Hamid.
- [05:15]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
Yeah, so I think David started at the right point before we lost him. Yeah. We developed or used data driven identity solutions to strengthen health systems and also to respond to public health emergencies. So over the decade and a half, now that we've been in the space as an ingo, we've been fortunate enough to be involved in a lot of programmatic themes and space. So for workforce health, workforce performance supervision, we've been involved since 2013, 2014 for surveillance and tracking. We've been involved to improve the quality and sensitivity of AFP surveillance by healthcare workers. We've also been integral in the eradication of polio through some of the projects that we've done in the past. Vaccination tracking system and some other polio related programs that we've been involved with in the past. All of these were integral in declaring Nigeria polio free sometime a few years back. So we've also done a lot of work on the immunization data platforms. We were involved with the recent COVID 19 where we helped to optimize and even rebuild aspects of the national platform for electronic management of immunization data. That's with the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency. So we were also about years back, 201516 field in immunization with what was called the VAX track where we were in Sierra Leone helping to use to create developed platforms that were used for tracking vaccinations. So medical or healthcare supply management will also be there, which is part of what we're talking about today of vaccine supply and delivery, which we've also been able to work on.
- [07:00]
Rita
Thank you. Abdul Hamid. We encourage you to look at the ehealthafrica website and also the reason for introducing E Health Africa in this plenary session right after these sessions on climate change and health and before the immunization session, if you go to the schedule on the conference website, you'll see that there are actually two workshops after this plenary session with ehealth Africa and EHA clinics that are likely to be of interest to many teach to reach participants and not only those from Nigeria. So integration of primary healthcare into vaccination strategies. So that is at 2:00pm Geneva. And then we also have the second session on neglected needs of women's health later in the afternoon right after the session for the 50 years of the expanded program on immunization. So in order to participate in those workshop sessions you will need to be connected to RingCentral and to be able to access. I'm actually going to show you where the session will take place. If you go to sessions in Ringcentral you'll see that there is actually a moderated session here to meet eHealth Africa and EHA clinics. That is when at this scheduled time we'll be encouraging you to join join those workshops later this afternoon to really meet eHealth Africa and learn more about them. But as Maria Manzan, our partnerships Coordinator has has indicated, Abdullah Hamid, you do have a digital solution to routine immunization challenges in Nigeria that you are going to present to us in plenary now ahead of the workshops.
- [08:39]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So maybe just to dive in quickly, I think maybe seven, five, seven minutes is something so that we have time for questions and other discussions. So like we rightly said, we're just addressing one aspect, one thematic area which is the immunization challenges we have suite of solutions for across different thematic areas. So for digital solutions for immunization challenge, one of the best solution or platform that we would like to showcase today will be the nomis, which is our logistics management information suite. So we are all aware that the healthcare logistics supply chain in Nigeria faces a lot of challenges and we feel that some of these challenges might even impact the achievement of universal health coverage by 2030. And just to mention a few of these challenges, you have inadequate investments, you have lack of data to assist all decision makers in making informed decision makings regarding vaccine and then you have lack of end to end transparency in the supply chain. So all of this culminated in Nigeria also being high, I think having the highest percentage for zero dose children globally, which is like I mentioned earlier, it's partly due to the lack of data, debt of data, you don't have availability of data for you to defend decisions. And that's where our solution comes in very critically. The next slide will show us in more graphical terms what the problem really is. You have 65% of the zero dose children living in just six countries and out of the six countries you can see on the chart that Nigeria takes a whopping 20% of that. India comes in next and then all the way down to Ethiopia with 3%. So we thought about in 2014 when we encountered some of these situations firsthand, we thought about building a solution that can help towards eradicating some of this or mitigating some of these issues. And we came up with Lomis in 2014. And for Lomis, it's quite simple. You need to track critical healthcare commodities. Focus of the conversation today will be on vaccine. But the solution, the platform is easily adaptable because it's built in a modular form. You can always adapt it to any other critical health commodity. Of course you can use it for blood, it's a critical health commodity, even though we do have a solution that is mostly lined to that. But LOMIS is easily adaptable to any critical health commodity that you may want to use it for. So it comprises currently of two solutions which we're integrating into one just to make sure that there are more seamless interaction between the two solutions. Next slide. I think here we talk about how it works. You have the LOMI stock, which is what sits mostly with the average user. It's installed on the mobile device, it's used by facility managers and it sends periodic reports on stops and wastages. And then on the other side we have the no means deliver, which is the delivery as, which is a solution that addresses delivery aspect, where it's also equally installed on mobile devices. It's used by delivery personnel. But it provides status of delivery quantities delivered and take care information such as utilization of the products and wasted and even temperature at which the product of vaccine in this case is being transported. We know that that's always a critical aspect because you need to transport vaccines at the right temperature. So all of this data is aggregated on a dashboard and this is where the key stakeholders get to see data which they can use for prompt and informed decision making. So some of the available information will be on the stock side. You can monitor stock levels, you can monitor quantity of products wasted. You can monitor stpe which is a quilting equipment status, number of children in the night, utilization of the vaccines at the health facilities and the capability to track even other health commodities like I mentioned earlier. Then for the delivery part you have status and timeliness of deliveries. You can check all hand stock quantity, you can record actual quantity delivered and you can also monitor KPIs on vaccine immunization. There's another interesting aspect which is the reverse logistics where you can now track wastages if you take vaccines to the facilities. You can also use the same platform for reverse where you take wastages back to other necessary areas or accordingly. So that's how some of the features you have with no listen, I think the second to the last slide will tell us. The penultimate slides will tell us about the impact, some key results or some kind of nice numbers that we can take a look at. For Sokoto states. These are states in Nigeria, mostly the northern part of the country. For Sokoto states, I've typed the 19 numbers. We have about over 300 facilities that are currently using monies. We have over 6,000 deliveries that has been done on the platform nonnis and then we have over 2 million vaccines that have been delivered. You can see what's most interesting here is the drive down in the stock out rate. 2017 when we implemented, before we implemented Lonis stock out which was about 61% after implementation, by 2021 we're able to drive that down to about 8%. And the story is the same in Zam state it's the same thing. We are able to drive the stock out from 49% to 0.5%. Kano states bounty the same thing. In Kano after implementation of LO, we're able to drive stock out from 45% to 1%. And likewise in Bounty state we're able to drive stock out from 73% all the way to 0.5% as well. The numbers are there, but I think they are Similar facilities that I've talked about hundred. We have over tens of thousands, millions of deliveries on the platform and we have thousands of deliveries that have been made so far. So not to take too much time, I go to. I think this should be the last slide. So where are we currently with these two type applications? We currently won the WFP Global Innovation Accelerating Challenge which Lonelies was actually the application that we submitted which won that channel in 2023 and we got a branch to integrate the two lonely set and Lonely Delivery so that we make them one application that is currently ongoing. In a few weeks, a month, couple of months, that will be done and then we are working part time from our own side to be integrate AI so that you can trigger delivery automated deliveries at the right time. For you to appreciate this, you need to put things in perspective. Most of the areas where you deploy these solutions or platforms are hard to reach challenging areas either due to security or probably due to one form of environmental issue or another. So it's key that if you could automate and get less human in proportion as much as possible, that will really be here. So that's what we do. So that what threshold when stock outs reach automatically the AI algorithm is going to trigger a delivery process without that doesn't require any manual intervention at all. Then we're also exploring the transition of knowledge to a digital public good dpg because it's so useful, we would like to have this tool into the hands of as many people as possible and also as many use cases as possible. So we have a roadmap for utilization and extended geographies. Currently it's within the northern part of the country, but we have a roadmap to extend that also beyond that to other states and probably other countries as well. I think that's all. The conclusion is quite straightforward. We have to put forecasting on because of health stocks availability and then everybody starts diving towards activity 0 stock out, which is the essential target or key metric for this. So I think I like to stop there so that there are room for questions, feedbacks and other competitions that we may have. Thank you very much again.
- [17:09]
Rita
All right, wonderful. Thank you very much indeed. Abdullah Hamid Yahya from E Health Africa. You are a teacher Reach partner and right after this, this plenary session going to go to the schedule again for those of you who have made it to Ringcentral and I am sorry if you did not. You'll see right after this plenary. So at the top of the hour in Geneva you're invited to join a workshop session inside the RingCentral platform on integration of primary healthcare into vaccination strategies. So this will be with Dr. Omozigo Isedon Nguyen, Dr. Murtala Jibril, Dr. Much Dat Baba. And we are now going to go to Maria, let's say and Charlotte to see if there are questions or comments. Of course. We just had a session on malaria that was far too short. So I see most of the messages seem to be about that. Maria, how are you doing? You've been up since the middle of the night in Argentina. You're our partnerships coordinator. You've worked closely with E Health Africa. First of all, what would you like to see about the two workshops that are coming up? Should teach to reach participants, attend them. Why or why not?
- [18:23]
Maria Manzan
Oh, definitely. Definitely you should come. It's going to be very interesting. All of us discussing remember that in the workshops there's plenty of room for all of us to participate. So E Health Clinics is going to be talking but we all get to to share our experiences too. So I'm looking forward to that after this this great session with Abdul Hamid and David. So there was one question a few seconds ago, but apparently they lowered their hands. But I'm encouraging people too. There you go. Let me just bring you so you can ask your question to to E Health Africa.
- [19:09]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
Yeah.
- [19:10]
Dr. Neka Onwu
Thank you very much, Maria. Thank you E Health and thank you for that beautiful presentation. I'm Dr. Neka Omori Chad as a director from National Primary Healthcare Government Agency and I'm aware of E Health, so well done. I'm happy to hear about Lomas. It's almost like the LMIs we were talking about at NPAC. Now we talk about integrated platform. How integrated is this platform? Does it include the private sector research? You talked about modules so I believe that your models looking at research. But we have a lot of information about research that's out there concerning primary healthcare and most of the time it'd be nice to get them integrated into this platform. The next was the maps. I saw that Sokoto and all. But it doesn't give you a disaggregated view of how you know the vaccines and all the materials are being utilized across the whole state. So that will give you a feedback looking at it and know where we have issues and problems because all the states are colored. I don't know whether you have a graded view of where your vaccines have reached and how it's being utilized as a feedback mechanism for somebody who's supervising or who wants to know where to target like they have to reach. So we're saying that we are doing in Sokoto, we're doing in Zamfara. You don't still get the idea or the feel of where and where this is getting to. So it'd be nice to see that digital public good. I don't know what that means. Other geographies, I don't know what that means, but I'm hoping that will go the way of an integrated health system platform where you're looking at maternal and child health starting from the planning area so that all the resources, how they feed in and how they are supplied is all pulled into one. So you're maximizing resources and you know, better utility of such a platform. But great thing, it helped and nice hearing from you. Just my what I was reading from permit me because I'm sure the time was short. I couldn't delve into it, but those are my thoughts as I was listening. Thank you.
- [21:16]
Rita
Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. This question's from Nana Onwu Neca Onwu, sorry, from nphcda. Yeah. Abdullah Hamid Yahya, would you like to respond to the different at least some of the issues raised by Neka Onwu, retired from mpacda. Retired. Apologies.
- [21:40]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
Yeah, yeah, those were very helpful, very, very useful comments. Yeah, I know because of time we might not be able to address all, but it's good to just share some insight on some of them. The integration was a technical integration about the solution. It's not only about the approach, how we're integrating with other communities. What I mentioned integration is rather than have the two solutions no means deliver and lomis talk working separately, we want to integrate them into one single solution so that data flow can happen more seamlessly across the two solutions. So you'll be able to get better insight because it's a single solution rather than have separate solutions. That's what I meant by integration. Then the disaggregated data, of course that's us photon on that there was no time. We have those maps that have all of the what is called a heat map that shows where troublesome areas and where the deliveries are going on more smoothly because it even happens real time. The essence of the platform is for you to be able to get real time data as the asset flows in, as the vaccine is being moved from one place to the other and as the vaccines are also being administered so that data actually exists. Maybe because it's a short presentation, we didn't necessarily capture that. We just wanted to show the impact how what has happened before the Implementation of learnings and what happened after the implementation of learnings in certain communities and for DPG Digital public goods, that's where the software becomes free open. It's already open source. We can give out the source code and everything free so that you don't need any, you don't need to pay for it. Instead of it being proprietary in any way, it's completely free for anyone to use it. So that's what we meant by DPG Other geographies is our plan to extend to other part of the country and also beyond Nigeria as well. But thank you very much Neka for those wonderful insights.
- [23:31]
Rita
Thank you very much. Now we have two questions from teach to each participants who are in the main ringcentral place. So. So it's from this actually one question. What is the relationship between zero dose and digital utilization to routine immunization? If you can help us connect the dots from the E Health Africa perspective, I think that would be helpful.
- [23:54]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
Yes, I think that's also another wonderful question. The vaccine. Because part of the challenge is you can't attain zero dose if at the critical time that a vaccine is required, you do not have the vaccine. If you don't have the information that will tell you when a vaccine will be required, it's going to be difficult. So what let me stop both this deliver and the stop which is being combined now what it does is it gives you that visibility for you to be able to plan ahead of time that at social time you require certain number of vaccine for administering. In this particular community or sub. Yeah, in this particular community I should say. So that insight that visibility, transparency, visibility that you do have now or that data allows you to make all of the informed decisions which will drive stock outs lower and also drives adoption of the vaccines higher and also helps you to reach the zero dose because most of the people that are challenged in getting these dosage are usually hard to reach and challenging areas. So that's the from a logistic point of view for this particular solutions. There are other programs and other solutions that address other aspects of the zero dose. But right now I think the conversation here is about the supply chain challenges that we have and how it connects to zero dose. Maybe David, you want to shed more light on that as well. But I think that's the response from my side.
- [25:21]
David Akpan
Yeah, I hope clear now. I think I got cut off. Is my Internet better now?
- [25:28]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
Yeah, we can hear you clearly now.
- [25:30]
David Akpan
Oh excellent. You know, rather we are talking about challenge with, you know, closing the digital divide. But I didn't know I'm gonna be one of them. Okay, yeah, a case in point. That's right.
- [25:43]
Dr. Neka Onwu
Yeah.
- [25:43]
David Akpan
So I mean I think you've really answered that carefully. So they to address zero dose. You there are different angle to that. So what we presented today is actually the supply chain approach, right. To ensuring you have timely delivery of vaccines when they are needed. We have another solution which Aduamit talked about in passing, which is called plant field that helps with the proper planning of vaccination process and that deep into even knowing where your coverage area is the most needed population, how are you going to plan to cover them, what cohort mapping you need to do, how do you deploy the team that solution deals with that. I don't think we have time to really talk about that. So definitely there's a connection with all of these to addressing zero dose and also optimizing routine immunization to the population that needs them.
- [26:39]
Rita
All right, thank you very much indeed. We want to give you time to go to the workshop session. I did want to show the the website for eHealth Africa and of course we encourage you teach to reach attendees to check out these partners who are supporting TEACH to Reach, supporting your participation in various ways and sharing the opportunities and the solutions that they provide. So that's the ehealth Africa website. And now I'm going to ask Maria to direct us. We are taking a pause in the plenary. So we're going to be to be closing down this plenary session until for the next hour. And Maria, why is that? What are the two options that people have at this stage as TEACH to each attendees to stay connected, continue to meet, connect and learn.
- [27:30]
Maria Manzan
Thank you, Rita. Yes. Well, we welcome you in the workshop with integration of primary health care into vaccination strategies that is gonna start in two minutes and it's with E Health Africa and EH clinics. Or you can choose to network, which is another option. You go to the networking in your left panel. You can choose the sessions or the networking and then you will be randomly placed with somebody to meet and learn and share your experiences for a few minutes too.
- [28:04]
Rita
All right. And I see there are already six people in the waiting in the workshop. So let's just go check that. Check that out.
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Abdul Hamid Yahya
Thank you.
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Rita
All right, so obviously the workshop is getting set up.
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Abdul Hamid Yahya
I want to share my.
- [28:20]
Rita
All right, let me share the direct link. I think they probably need you, Maria. They probably need your support in the next few minutes. Let me just share for those of you who are with us in the Zoom studio and, and for those of you who are on the stage following this, before we shut down the live stream, we're going to share the eHealth Africa workshop link so you can go directly there. But really by now you should be comfortable with navigating with the Let me just put a pin in that. And then we're going to do a brief recap while participants go off to either network or to attend the eHealth Africa workshop, the first of two workshops in addition to this plenary session. We're going to just recap what we did today. There's been a lot happening and we hope that we're leaving you thirsting for more. All right, so we started the day this morning in Geneva. May be the time may be very different and very inconvenient depending on where you are in the world. Introducing Teach to Reach Connect we introduced the Immunization Vaccines Work Collaborative that is being launched by the Nigeria Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 with the Geneva Learning Foundation, UNICEF and NPHCDA. We're of course going to celebrate in just about an hour the humanly possible 50 years of the expanded program on immunization. So that'll be coming up an hour from now. We of course also honored and saluted our and thanked our supporters and partners e. Health Africa EHA clinics, but also uniting to combat NTDs. We just had a amazing session on NTDs. Really actually a difficult session in some ways and I think there are definitely some things to celebrate. We gave you the numbers for this Teach to Reach Looking back to teach to reach 6, teach to reach 7, teach to reach 8, teach to reach 9 and today's amazing number teach to reach 10 21,398 participants registered over 1,500 experiences shared and activity across the the Teach to Reach network. Before, during and after Teach to Reach we had of course during the opening ceremony a remarkable set of tests, testimonials, stories shared by women who deliver vaccines. We highlighted the Women Inspiring Women collection and then a tangible practical output for immunization workers involved in HPV vaccination efforts. We're publishing, we're about to share with Teach to Reach participants this compendium of experiences and this really kind of handbook and tips from the frontline from health workers have actually introduced scaled up and sustained HPV vaccination. We collected thousands of experiences and our Insights team has condensed them down into a short, concise, practical handbook of tips that you can use. And we're working with 32 ministries of health who've expressed interest to determine how we can best disseminate this experiences handbook, these tips to health workers involved in HPV vaccination. It's the first time we've sort of closed the loop working with the national EPI teams using knowledge that is grounded in the practical experiences of health workers. So stay with us. We're not done yet. If you haven't left yet for the for the workshop, for networking, of course you can stay connected in zoom. That's the best way to make sure you don't lose your seat because of how many people are involved today, today. But we're looking forward to the EPI session. Teach to Reach started with immunization in January 2021, which of course was a very specific moment in the history of immunization when immunization staff all over the world were getting ready to introduce COVID 19 vaccines. So I think that's the recap. We hope you have a great networking or session or workshop. We also want to thank our media partners. Devex is one of three media partners. Together with Gavi's Vaccines Work blog you can find they're running a set of a series of articles about based again on the Teach Reach experiences shared. And then we also have Health Policy Watch, an independent global health news outfit that has just published a Inside view on teach to reach 10 with over 21,000 health workers uniting to tackle climate and immunization challenges. That's the recap for this first session. We'll see you in less than an hour after the workshop. After Networking for the 50 years Celebrating 50 years of the expanded program of On Immunization. The latest estimate is that of over 154 million lives saved through the efforts of of course global partners, but also health workers on the front lines working side by side with communities. Once again, thank you and we'll see you very soon.
- [34:02]
Abdul Hamid Yahya
SA.