Enterprise IT vendor IBM said Zambia’s Medical Stores (MSL) will deploy a new medical supply chain pilot project using analytics and mobile technologies to manage medicine inventory and delivery.
The project is supported by the World Bank, the Department for International Development, UNICEF and London Business School.
The aim of the pilot – in association with the Zambian Ministry of Health – is to provide citizens with improved access to 200 life saving drugs. .
The goal of the medicine supply chain management project is to save more lives by making medicine widely available. Currently, Zambia registers 100,000 deaths annually due to preventable and treatable diseases.
IBM said the Ministry of Health is introducing technology to manage supply chain and control the usage, supply, availability and access to essential medicine within the Zambian health sector. The solution will provide a real-time view of drug usage and stock while analyzing data to identify trends and forecasts to prevent gaps in the medical supply chain.
Using the IBM SPSS medicine supply forecast model, which takes into account local conditions such as the local rainy season, lead time and differences in each district’s demographics, MSL will be able to determine optimized distribution of drugs across an initial 2,190 health centers.
The IBM Analytics capabilities will be integrated with the IBM MobileFirst application development portfolio, enabling staff at health facilities in three Zambian districts to use mobile devices with barcode scanners to record and transmit stock and utilization details to a central inventory control system.
The program will leverage IBM’s ILOG optimization technology to calculate the ideal composition of drug shipments based on available inventory, resources and historical usage. Each district will have a real-time view of drug stock levels at the clinics and the ability to coordinate the transfer of supplies from one facility to another if required.
InfotechLead News Team
