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Leveraging data to strengthen health supply chain system
Priscillah Balirwa
What you need to know:
- In Uganda, as in many countries globally, effective healthcare supply chain management is critical to ensuring that essential medicines and medical supplies reach those who need them most, especially amid current challenges such as the medical interns’ strike and the mpox outbreak.
The availability of essential medicines and health supplies (EMHS) is crucial for promoting health and achieving universal health coverage.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that about one-third of the world’s population lacks access to quality essential medicines and diagnostics, with significant concerns in low and middle-income countries. Inadequate access to drugs and diagnostics undermines the effectiveness of healthcare and erodes public confidence in the health system. To ensure access to EMHS, a well-functioning supply chain system that efficiently moves medicines and supplies from manufacturers to end-user health facilities is essential.
However, several challenges affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the supply chain system. These include limited resources, inadequate inventory data, ineffective and vertical structures, inappropriate distribution to the last mile, defective forecasting and ordering processes, and a lack of innovations.
In Uganda, as in many countries globally, effective healthcare supply chain management is critical to ensuring that essential medicines and medical supplies reach those who need them most, especially amid current challenges such as the medical interns’ strike and the mpox outbreak.
At the last mile of Uganda’s healthcare system are Community Health Extension Workers (CHEWs) and Village Health Teams (VHTs), known as community health workers globally, who move door-to-door delivering healthcare and education to communities, thereby bridging the gap in access to healthcare.
Uganda’s public supply chain, of which the community is a part, faces challenges such as logistical inefficiencies, stock-outs, and distribution gaps, which hinder the delivery of healthcare services to communities, especially in remote and underserved areas.
The current healthcare digitisation agenda by the Government of Uganda presents an opportunity to leverage data for planning and implementing a supply chain system that is responsive to the needs of health facilities across all levels of care.
With support from partners, the Ministry of Health (MoH) developed an electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS) in 2020 as part of community-level interventions aimed at improving primary health care.
This offline-first digital job aid is accessible by the VHTs and CHEWs on mobile phones, allowing for the collection and synchronisation of data in near real-time for performance monitoring and planning.
With the availability of near real-time data from the eCHIS collected over the past five years, there is an opportunity to create a demand-driven supply chain system.
Health facilities to which CHEWs and VHTs report can utilise this opportunity to understand the rate at which commodities are consumed at the community level. This information can inform the forecasting of future needs and ultimately influence the quantities received from the national level. This approach will not only minimise stock-out at the community level but also reduce wastage for health facilities that receive more than they need.
By harnessing the power of data from digital medical record systems, we can transform Uganda’s public supply chain system into a responsive, efficient, and patient-centred network. Let us seize this opportunity to revolutionise healthcare in Uganda.
The writer is digital health manager, Living Goods Uganda [email protected]
