Resources

The procurement process plays an important role in ensuring that a cost-effective and efficient selection and award process is conducted to obtain appropriate and sustainable technologies and supplies to support the health facility’s oxygen therapy needs. To achieve this objective, an integrated approach to procurement should be adopted—one that engages key stakeholders in the appropriate planning and procurement activities.The Procurement Guide has been developed as a resource to help effectively plan, procure, and sustain oxygen delivery devices for health care facilities. The guide covers the selection and procurement of the different components of an oxygen delivery system, including cylinders, oxygen concentrators, oxygen-generation plants, pulse oximeters, and the required accessories, such as oxygen blenders and flowmeters, consumables such as nasal cannula and oxygen tubing, and spare and replacement parts such as filters for oxygen concentrators and batteries for pulse oximeters. It incorporates references to relevant tools and resources developed as part of the Oxygen Delivery Toolkit, as well as other helpful guidance from international agencies and normative bodies.This resource is part of the Oxygen Delivery Toolkit: Resources to plan and scale medical oxygen. The materials provided within the toolkit can be used together or separately, as needed. The complete toolkit is available at www.path.org/oxygen-delivery-toolkit.

Access to consistent, reliable, and high-quality electricity is especially critical for health systems that rely on electromedical devices for patient diagnosis and treatment. There are countless examples of facilities across developing countries that cannot properly carry out their work without access to electricity or that have lost expensive electromedical devices, lab equipment, and critical oxygen equipment due to poor power quality.The Electricity Planning Guide is designed to inform country stakeholders on how to improve the way electromedical devices are deployed and used at health care facilities in low- and middle-income countries. The guide provides information on electricity availability, quality, and cost in selected countries, and includes recommendations for deployment of electromedical devices. Though the guide focuses on examples that are specific to medical oxygen delivery devices and pulse oximeters, the recommendations hold general applicability to other electromedical devices.This resource is part of the Oxygen Delivery Toolkit: Resources to plan and scale medical oxygen. The materials provided within the toolkit can be used together or separately, as needed. The complete toolkit is available at www.path.org/oxygen-delivery-toolkit.

The UK Government established the Fleming Fund to respond to the global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a One Health Initiative to fight AMR in low- and middle-income countries. In Vietnam, with support from the Fleming Fund and FHI 360 Vietnam, PATH will work and support the Vietnam Medical Services Administration, the Department of Animal Health, and surveillance laboratories to strengthen data systems to help combat AMR.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is an approach that organizations can use to help align their information system (IS) with their mission, goals, and objectives and help them determine how to most effectively achieve their objectives, by investing in information and communication technology. EA applies principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, IS, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. The EA approach can help the health sector simplify the complexity of its health information system (HIS) by identifying important relationships and aligning different components of the HIS, to reduce the risks of fragmentation, duplication, and lack of interoperability.The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes EA as a method of assessing or describing technology adoption in the health sector. For member countries to achieve HIS improvement, WHO recommends the following development steps: architecture vision, business architecture, IS architecture, technology architecture, opportunities and solutions, migration planning, implementation governance, and architecture change management. In line with WHO and other global standards, Tanzania first articulated its intent to use EA to manage digital transformation in the health sector in its first national eHealth strategy (2013-2018). Through its Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, the Government of Tanzania aimed to use EA to guide the development of an integrated national HIS. The need for the health sector to apply the EA approach is also evident in Tanzania’s draft National Health Policy (2020), which aims “to achieve improved efficiency of the Health Management Information Systems (HMIS) and its associated processes to meet health-sector monitoring and evaluation requirements.”

National malaria control programs (NMCPs) are frequently faced with making decisions that require trade-offs in order to best allocate scarce resources to control and eliminate malaria. With limited budgets, NMCPs need to choose how to fund staff, research, operations, essential drugs and diagnostics, and many other items in a manner that maximizes the potential impact on reducing malaria. A mismatch between product characteristics and NMCP need will result in overspending and opportunity costs because those wasted funds could have been used elsewhere.This fact sheet explores these potential downstream consequences for NMCPs of upstream decisions made during the product development process on two examples related to diagnostics used in malaria case management.