Across Tanzania, health providers often face the same problem: a lack of access to the data they need to make informed decisions and deliver high-quality care. Since the 2013 launch of the country’s National eHealth Strategy, the national government has made an earnest commitment to reverse this trend. USAID's Flagship Maternal & Child Survival Program supported the Ministry of Health, Community, Development, Gender, Elderly, and Children (MoHCDGEC) to lauch the Tanzania Nati...

Innovative solutions are not limited to products, drugs, or diagnostics. They include novel approaches and applications of a technology, service, or intervention to help countries advance their reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and development targets. As the immunization and child health technical lead for USAID’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Project (MCSP), JSI supports the expansion of the evidence base for...

Finding the Perfect Temperature: Protecting Lifesaving Vaccines in Remote Areas
Immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective public health interventions in history, saving 2-3 million lives every year. In Tanzania, JSI is installing remote temperature monitoring devices to strengthen the immunization cold chain and ensure that vaccines make it to the last mile. 

Cross-posted from the JSI website with thanks! inSupply, JSI’s regional supply chain consulting center in East Africa, in partnership with Llamasoft and the Nichols Group, recently examined the potential for employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver life-saving and other commodities within a public health system. They examined the cost-effectiveness of UAVs versus a motorcycle-based system and other well-run forms of land transport, using three sets of data from Afri...

As more low- and middle-income countries explore opportunities to improve their public health supply chains and diagnostics networks, knowing how best to use unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to improve reach in the last mile is critical. Under the inSupply project, JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc., and our partners LLamasoft, Inc. and the Nichols Group provide objective guidance for countries and public health stakeholders on how to make informed decisions about which health products to p...

Greetings, colleagues. With increasing importance on user-focused improvements in routine, administrative immunization data quality and use, it is useful to have some experience-sharing from country learning and implementation. Linked below are a few recent blog posts and an article on in-country review meetings that may be of interest. These include experiences from Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Madagascar and Uganda. 1) Zimbabwe defaulter tracking: http://thepump.j...

Hello! We're pleased to announce an opening for a DHIS2 Advisor to join our Applied Technology Team. JSI is looking for a DHIS2 Advisor that can (a) provide high-level value-added guidance and active technical assistance to international health information systems projects in their development and implementation of DHIS2 and (b) providing technical leadership for JSI in the field of Health Information Systems (HIS). Candidates can apply online at jsi.com if interested.

Blockchain is the hot new technology topic in the financial world, the health sector, and the supply chain industry. The idea, first applied by the virtual “cryptocurrency” Bitcoin, combines the security of cryptography with the safety of distributed data. This combination results in distributed ledger technology (DLT) that is highly secure and very difficult to hack because there is no central server containing all dat...

JSI is proud to announce the launch of a new flagship publication, The Supply Chain Manager’s Handbook, this time in a new website format. Based on more than 30 years of experience improving public health supply chains in more than 60 countries, The Supply Chain Manager’s Handbook is also informed by the latest innovations and commercial best practices in managing supply chains for medicines, vaccines, diagnostics, and other essential...

When it comes to medical supplies, transport challenges can add up to serious gaps in health care for rural people. That’s why John Snow, Inc., through the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT partnered with Medical Stores Department (MSD) in Tanzania to map more than 30,000 kilometers of road connecting more than 5,600 health facilities across the country. The USAID | DELIVER PROJECT, whic...

As supply chain professionals working in the global health sector, we have heard countless requests and statements over the years to integrate data from HMIS and LMIS tools. This is partly to streamline reporting channels and to reduce the reporting burden, and partly to attempt to compare information between the two systems. Often this conversation is burdened by a lack of understanding about how the two data sets differ.


As countries adopt electronic information systems to man...

Dear Colleagues,
JSI is pleased to announce a new publication in the Getting Products to People series:

Dose per Container Partnership (DPCP)
The issue: Multi-dose containers are used to offer lower prices, higher supply volumes, and minimize cold chain storage and distribution requirements. As new, more expensive, vaccines are introduced in multi-dose presentations, maximizing the use of every dose in a container increases in importance. HCWs need to be more strategic about when to open a container; diligent about how they care for open containers, and potentia...

Today is Innovation Day during World Immunization Week, and there are a lot of innovative ideas out there to reach every child. But innovation doesn’t always require radical new ideas. Sometimes it simply means challenging traditional approaches based on current information. For immunization supply chains, that means changing over 40 years of custom to embrace state-of-the-art commercial best practices.
Imagine a scenario in which a global soft drink company launches a new marketi...

Earlier this month, the Dose Per Container Partnership (DPCP) project was launched. This Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project is implemented by JSI and partners (PATH, Agence de Médecine Préventive (AMP), Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), HERMES modelling team and the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) / Johns Hopkins University). The project will help identify evidence needed to support better-informed decision making related to the trade-offs between cost and hea...

The newly launched Global Financing Facility (GFF) for Every Woman Every Child is a bold initiative coordinating a mix of donor funds, loans, and domestic financing for the purpose of accelerating country efforts to end preventable maternal, child, and infant deaths by 2030. Health supplies and the supply chain systems that deliver them, however, are often afterthoughts in these efforts. “Global Financing Facility: Advancing Smartly Means Keeping an Eye on Family Planning Products and the Sup...

Since 2006, the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT has worked to improve the health and well-being of communities around the world. Our contributions span the globe and touch all areas of health supply chain management. Over the past nine years, we have supported malaria, family planning, maternal and child health, and emerging pandemic threat programs, among other areas. As we move into the final year of the project,IQC DirectorEdward Wilson takes a look back at the project's accomplishments. Learn mor...

In the last decade, vaccine information management has slowly evolved from paper at every level in the health system, to Excel-based reports at higher levels (districts or above) that are emailed, to simple stand-alone databases with exported PDF reports, and most recently web forms that capture data and display essential dashboards online. Different countries are at different stages in this evolution, and most still rely on paper to capture data from health facilities and vaccination points. In...

cStock is a simple mHealth system that helps to ensure community health workers in Malawi have lifesaving products to treat children under five. cStock was originally piloted in 6 districts and 3 of these districts also implemented supporting teams. The greatest benefits were shown in districts with both increased data visibility from cStock and communication from teams. The Enhanced Management approach including cStock and teams is currently being scaled up nationwide. View our new infographi...