Musa Adamu
Abuja
IBM has announced a collaboration with the Zambian Ministry of Health to provide citizens with improved access to 200 lifesaving drugs. Supported by the World Bank, the Department for International Development, UNICEF and London Business School.
Zambia’s Medical Stores Limited (MSL) will deploy a new medical supply chain pilot project using sophisticated analytics and mobile technologies to better manage medicine inventory and delivery.
The public health sector in Zambia registers 100,000 deaths annually due to preventable and treatable diseases. The goal of the medicine supply chain management project is to save more lives by making medicine widely available when and where it’s needed. The Ministry of Health is introducing innovative technology to manage a scalable 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.
Chief Executive Officer of MSL, Dr Bonface Fundafunda said: “With help from our partners, we have already introduced simple improvements in the medical supply chain that will save the lives of thousands of children across our country by 2015,”said Dr.,. “To build on these gains, we’re working with IBM to replace our paper-based inventory system with cutting-edge technology that can pinpoint the exact locations where stocks of essential medicines are running dangerously low.”
Operations Officer, Africa Health Unit at the World Bank John Makumba, noted “Zambia is taking strong action to prevent avoidable deaths by testing and deploying new methods to get drugs to people on time,” “Supply chains are invisible and low profile, but when they don’t work, there are terrible consequences.”
