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Vodacom, DoH deploy real-time medicine availability monitoring app

14th July 2016

By: Natasha Odendaal

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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Telecommunications giant Vodacom and South Africa’s Department of Health (DoH) have spent the last few months deploying a mobile-based real-time system that monitors the availability of medicines at primary healthcare (PHC) clinics and mitigates sporadic through recurring challenges of medicine shortages and expirations.

The Stock Visibility System (SVS) was now active at 3 126 clinics in all of South Africa’s provinces, barring the Western Cape, which had its own medicine monitoring system, said Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi on Thursday.

“This has enabled us to ensure national-level oversight of medicine availability in all nine provinces as SVS and Western Cape medicine availability data can now be pulled into a central PHC dashboard which forms part of the National Surveillance Centre,” he told media at a briefing in Midrand.

In short, the SVS was a mobile application used to report medicine availability at PHC clinics, enabling informed decision-making and proactive stock management in the last mile of the supply chain.

“Increased access to information results in improved demand planning and proactive medicine supply management, and leads to improved availability of essential medicine and consequently translates into improved treatment outcomes for patients,” he added.

The manual systems the DoH had previously relied on for the dissemination of medicine availability data were initially replaced through a pilot project at all 605 PHC clinics in KwaZulu-Natal and all 478 clinics in Limpopo in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

The pilot, which monitored the availability of all antiretroviral (ARV), tuberculosis (TB) and vaccine stock items, resulted in a decrease in the overall number of stock-outs, or shortages, reported.

The KwaZulu-Natal clinics showed a decrease in shortages of ARVs, TB medicines and vaccines by 46%, 49% and 14% respectively, while Limpopo clinics reported a decrease in shortages of 66%, 49% and 42% respectively.

“The SVS allows PHC clinic staff to report stock levels and translates this information into various reports, sent through SMS or email, which include graphs and heat maps, and are used to support the proactive management of medicines.

“The app also allows for scheduled SMS notifications and automated alerts warning of low stock level situations [that could] result in supply interruptions, thereby providing a means of preventing stock-outs from happening in the first place,” Vodacom Business CEO Vuyani Jarana explained.

DoH health regulations and compliance management deputy director-general Dr Anban Pillay said the application boasted barcode scanning technology, networked systems and geospacial mapping capabilities and was able to monitor all essential medicines and could capture stock-on-hand, stock received, stock lost and expiry dates.

The application produced medicine availability and stock-out reports by line item at facility level, stock-out heat maps, over- and under-stocking warning signals and short-dated stock warning signals for medicine less than three months to expiry.

Further, SVS would enable improved demand planning and forecasting and inventory management, while enabling rapid response to and resolution of identified challenges through the real-time dissemination of information.

The system had been deployed to 717 PHC clinics in the Eastern Cape, 220 in the Free State, 309 in the North West, 285 in Mpumalanga, 350 in Gauteng and 162 in the Northern Cape, Motsoaledi said.

“This will, ultimately, lead to the reduction of stock loss through expiry, resulting in massive savings in the expenditure losses related to healthcare commodities,” he commented.

In addition, the system would alleviate the pressure expected from the DoH’s new Test and Treat ARV treatment strategy, which was expected to significantly add to the 3.1-million people already receiving treatment under South Africa’s ART programme.

This was expected to place pressure on the DoH’s medicine supply systems to deliver the volumes of treatment needed.

“The next stage in improving medicine availability which we have planned is to use data from SVS in conjunction with upstream electronic stock management systems such as RxSolution,” Motsoaledi said.

“This integration will allow the upstream system to automatically place replenishment orders for clinics in an informed push replenishment, a further modernisation of supply chain practices. The orders placed automatically will be based on monthly stock consumption determinations based on regularly reported medicine availability information uploaded onto the SVS.”

Management Sciences for Health country representative Bada Pharasi said that RxSolution was an electronic pharmaceutical management system designed to manage medicine supplies from procurement to dispensing.

“It has impacted positively on the daily practices of hospital pharmacy staff, who have expressed satisfaction in the way they have managed to reduce patient waiting times, among other benefits,” he commented.

RxSolution was currently installed in more than 445 facilities, including 242 public hospitals and community health centres, with another 200 hospitals expected to be equipped with the system over the next 18 months.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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