Resources

Project Optimize, a World Health Organization and PATH collaboration, is working to enable immunization programs to take advantage of the true stability of vaccines by labeling them for use at ambient temperatures in a controlled temperature chain for limited periods of time as appropriate to the stability of the antigen.

In collaboration with the Albanian Ministry of Health, project Optimize has installed a short message service–based system that monitors and logs temperature conditions in peripheral cold chain equipment. The team aims to assess the benefits of remote alarm systems over nonconnected temperature loggers.

This fact sheet outlines the different approaches that project Optimize, a World Health Organization and PATH collaboration, is testing to demonstrate that a consumption‐based system that uses service-delivery-level data can have a beneficial impact on inventory management, stock levels, and vaccine wastage.

Project Optimize, a collaboration between the World Health Organization and PATH, aims to provide national immunization programs with recommendations to build integrated health supply systems, including strategic linkages with the parastatal and private sector. Ultimately, integration will allow public health programs to reduce uncertainties and risks, achieve economies of scale, shorten delivery lead times, improve procurement, provide better incentives for health workers, and improve quality of service to clients.

Today, most health workers at the service‐delivery level in developing countries use paper‐based systems to track the individuals who have been vaccinated and the vaccines and other resources used during the process. Project Optimize, a World Health Organization and PATH collaboration, is working with the Albanian Institute of Public Health to develop and implement an immunization information system that will provide the type of high-quality, granular data that policymakers need.