Resources

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.

Many health facilities in remote areas operate without grid electricity, have unreliable electricity, or find that using electricity is too costly. In these settings, solar energy is a promising solution for powering the storage and transportation of vaccines and heat‐sensitive drugs at controlled temperatures. Project Optimize, a collaboration between the World Health Organization and PATH, has been working with public and private partners on several solar technologies tailored to the following local electrical power conditions: unavailable or unreliable power, intermittent power, and reliable power.

Project Optimize is collaborating with the Senegalese Ministry of Health to implement and validate a "moving warehouse" that will streamline the vaccine supply chain from the regional to the peripheral level. A moving warehouse is a truck composed of delivery teams that visit each health facility, check stock levels, and replenish stock as needed.

Keeping heat-sensitive vaccines and other drugs at the right temperature is crucial yet often difficult in areas with limited or no electrical power. In response to this challenge, a group of public- and private-sector partners is working with project Optimize to evaluate a range of transportation and storage containers for heat-sensitive drugs and vaccines that operate in environments with or without access to reliable power.