YouthPower
Inclusive value chains for emerging markets.
Across the developing world, access to essential medicines in frontier communities is hindered by economic and logistical challenges. Poor transportation and telecommunications infrastructure and a lack of visibility into supply chains of essential medicines make health programs expensive and unreliable. Logistimo is a resilient platform conceived to meet the challenges of those environments.
Logistimo's immunisation SCM tool is designed to ensure that the correct vaccine reaches the correct child, at the correct location, at the correct dosage and potency. Logistimo pioneers scalable and resilient web, mobile, IoT and AI-enabled supply chain systems to ensure high availability of health commodities at sustainable costs to the last-mile. The amount of orchestration that goes into executing this in the analog world is immense and affordable mobile and cloud computing technology has made it possible to manage these processes in the most challenging low-resource environments. We have a great opportunity to accelerate the timeline by which we reach >95% vaccination coverage for children worldwide in line with SDG goals. Our further vision for global impact is to deploy our solution widely where it can have catalytic impacts on social programs that aim to expand access to all public goods. From all classes of health commodities, to nutrition, clean water and energy, we think that humane technologies can nurture sustainable and equitable development.
Logistimo seeks to replicate its impacts in immunisation coverage in India across a broader stretch of the world – moving from an 18 million birth cohort to a 54 million across different countries in less than 3 years, imparting world-class vaccine supply chain performance to nations that adopt the platform. Within India alone, upon full national rollout of the eVIN (electronic vaccine intelligence network) program, our coverage will reach nearly 28 million children annually. We place a high priority on impacting countries that have been designated by GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance as most in need of assistance, and many of these are in Africa, South and Southeast Asia. Apart from the direct benefits accrued to the additional tens of millions of babies covered under efficiently managed and executed immunisation programs, the broader footprint of impact is many times that when one considers the immediate family of beneficiaries and their communities. Furthermore, our platform having been conceived from the user-centric approach of a frontline health worker and not just a program executive, is strongly allied with the aim to localise accountability in health deployments. The technical assistance staff we recruit in country are there to facilitate knowledge transfer to the point of care, and foster greater in-country participation in the Logistimo open source user community.
Traditional interventions that aim to achieve real-time visibility of the supply chain follow a top down approach and often rely on third parties to perform data entry for the last-mile. The Logistimo mobile applications facilitate bottom-up empowerment and gives voice to the last-mile users who are otherwise reliant on supervisors and third parties to report on their behalf. Availability of real-time data across the supply chain leads to greater transparency and eventually greater accountability across the value chain. Additionally, the mobile application is designed with a strong focus on user centric design, a testament to the intuitiveness of the interface is that even first time users of smart phones can be trained to become proficient users of the application in less than a day. Data has shown that even 60 year old users (assumed to be less comfortable with digital technology) are as active as 18 year old users on the platform.
The solution developed over the past 8 years contains: the Sensory network for data collection (mobile phone & IoT solutions that work across SMS, GPRS, NFC, Online & Offline modes), Cerebral Network (Machine Learning trained on Big Data that forecasts and recommends interventions) for Real-time decision support (with alerts, dashboards on Bulletin Boards etc). However, as a product company we work on 2 year product horizon, with newer modules and features introduced every quarter. A four-step process is followed to measure progress and methodological rigor of the technology itself and also the effectiveness of the deployment. First, User Adoption is assessed by measuring metrics such as Access (Does frequency of data entry match standard operating procedures?), Completeness (Is data entry performed for all inventory items?) and Timeliness (Is data entry performed within 24/48 hours of the physical transaction). Next, Data Quality is assessed by measuring metrics such as frequency and magnitude of data entry errors and also the frequency and magnitude of mismatches between digital and physical stock positions. Thirdly, Supply Chain indicators are assessed by evaluating metrics such as Stockouts and Wastage Rates, Inventory Utilization and Replenishment Response Time. Finally, Sustainability indicators are assessed by evaluating metrics such as cost saved per dose/per child and reduced supervisory layers.