Infrastructure

Friendship Bangladesh is implementing a structured 3-tier healthcare delivery model to provide comprehensive healthcare to isolated river-based and coastal communities of northern and southern Bangladesh. System consists of Friendship Community Medic Aides (FCMs), satellite clinics and hospital ships to reach those living in complex, remote environments. The proposed project covers a wide range of services, ranging from basic awareness building to advanced curative care.

Association pour la Promotion de la Santé des Communautés pour le Développement (SaCodé) is a non-profit social enterprise based in Bujumbura, Burundi. Their washable and reusable Agateka sanitary pads are made from locally sourced cotton fabrics, uniquely designed with straps that allow them to be worn with or without underwear. Pads are delivered alongside comprehensive menstrual hygiene management and sexual and reproductive health and rights education programming for adolescent girls, facilitated through school clubs, an SMS platform and magazines.

Tanya Doherty of the South African Medical Research Council will assess different contracting models for the National Health Insurance, which has been charged with providing universal health services purchased from both the public and private sectors across South Africa, to ensure that cesarean sections are only performed when appropriate and safe.

Anna Winters of Akros Inc. in the U.S. will adapt an existing web-based mapping tool currently in use in several low-middle income countries that guides and maps the progress of health-related campaigns, to incorporate human movement and thereby improve campaign coverage. Although the existing tool maps populations at the level of individual households, it fails to incorporate spatial-temporal population changes caused by permanent relocation, seasonal migration, and short-term movements, which are more difficult to track.

Kerry Selvester of Associação Académica de Nutrição e Segurança Alimentar (ANSA) in Mozambique will develop an interactive online mapping and data visualization tool to identify high-risk and under-served populations in Mozambique to improve the outcome of health campaigns. They will generate high-resolution maps of existing geospatial datasets such as estimated travel time to health facilities and use remote sensing and make predictions using machine learning approaches to generate new maps of other health-related indicators.

Mark Adams of Population Services International in the U.S. will develop a "Digital Gateway" that provides health campaign managers easy access to a range of datasets to improve the planning and performance, and lower the cost, of health campaigns. Health campaigns generate data, such as population estimates, locations of health clinics, and mobile phone data, that could make planning new campaigns much more efficient, but these data tend to be difficult to access.

Nyasatu Ntshalintshali of the Clinton Health Access Initiative in the U.S. will use a benchmarking approach to guide individuals and teams delivering mass drug administration (MDA) campaigns in low-middle income regions in order to improve coverage. Individual and team behavior during health campaign planning and implementation have been identified as major causes of variation in campaign quality and performance. To encourage behavioral changes, they will use a benchmarking technique that shows individuals that their peers behave in the desired way.

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.