Health System Design

David Hammel of Balcony Labs Inc. in the U.S. together with their partner Direct-Relief will develop a communication tool that combines smartphone messaging with geographical information systems to enable health campaign managers to communicate directly with health workers and civilians in a specific region of interest to improve the impact of their campaigns. The tool enables managers to send messages such as alerts, instructions, or surveys, directly to target areas, as well as collect geo-specific information in real-time for updating campaign designs and evaluating outcome.

Robert Miros of 3rd Stone Design, Inc. in the U.S. will adapt their portable vaccine refrigerator, which is battery powered and can be monitored remotely, to maximize the charge life so that it can support vaccination campaigns in low- and middle-income countries. Vaccines are normally stored in ice boxes and manually tracked, both of which are unreliable and can cause spoiling. Their vaccine refrigerator integrates thermo-electricity cooling and battery power together with an algorithm that can sense temperature and adjust it according to the available power.

Coite Manuel of Food Chain LLC. in the U.S. will develop a web-based tool that takes existing road network and population data for any country, divides it into regions, and identifies the closest health facility based on type and time of travel to improve health campaign planning and better monitor population health. Current approaches to map catchment areas for health facilities use administrative boundaries or population statistics, which often don't reflect where people actually go.

James Lavery of Emory University in the U.S. will adapt an organizational learning tool to enable global health campaigns to draw on their experiences, improve their partner interactions, and enhance their overall impact. Global health campaigns are primarily evaluated in terms of program delivery and outcomes. However, these large and complex organizations interact with many different partners, and there is an untapped opportunity to improve their performance by learning about how their design and approaches affect each other.

Mosokah Fallah of the National Public Health Institute of Liberia will provide health campaign staff with activity tracking devices and movement-based bonuses to encourage more accurate reporting of coverage to improve impact. There have been large inconsistences between the reported and actual numbers of drugs and vaccines administered during health campaigns in Liberia. This may be due to the lack of motivation and accountability of health campaign staff.

Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University in the U.S. will develop a computational tool to support health campaigns in low- and middle-income countries that can predict the number and location of the people that need targeting. They will use freely available databases, including the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), covering over 10 million households and high-resolution population estimates to estimate the percentage of children under 5-years-old who are un- or under-vaccinated within each 30m by 30m area.

Laura Smith of Research Foundation for the State University of New York in the U.S. will develop a decision-making tool that can plan more effective health campaigns in low- and middle-income countries by considering any competing interests of stakeholders. Health campaigns involve many different government and private stakeholders with differing interests.

Sangeeta Jobanputra of Connecti3 LLC in the U.S. together with the University of Rwanda and Multiverse Investments will develop a method that uses existing datasets and predictive analytics to better plan all types of health campaigns to broaden their coverage and minimize costs. The challenge of identifying those in need of a specific health service is a barrier to successful health campaigns. To address this, they will use existing databases to identify and score predictors of higher risk to a specific health condition, such as level of poverty in vitamin A deficiency.

Hannah Wild of Stanford University in the U.S. will develop a modelling-based approach that uses remote sensing and geospatial analysis to include neglected and high-risk nomadic populations in health databases and for campaign planning. Nomadic pastoralists are some of the poorest populations but they are often missed by health services and campaigns because they are difficult to track. They will design algorithms and methods that use satellite imagery and open access geospatial data to capture population movements over time, which will be validated in the field.

Simon Mutembo of the Macha Research Trust in Zambia will develop a method to identify and map children who have never received vaccinations so that they can be targeted during mass vaccination campaigns. Many of these children live in remote areas and are missed by population estimates. Their method combines field work by community health workers with spatial intelligence using a geospatial application on smart phones to develop geographical maps of vaccination coverage at the household level. Households with low or no vaccinations can then be targeted directly by campaign health workers.