IoT in Vaccine and Tracking Coronavirus COVID-19: E-coffee chat with Dr. Shalini Verma, UNDP
In my previous two articles, I wrote about Digital Transformation at AirAsia (World’s top low-cost airline) and Digital Disruption at Anheuser-Busch InBev (World’s largest brewer). Both articles were based on the analysis of my research and application of my business learnings that I acquired at Babson College.
For this article, I interviewed Dr. Shalini Verma, a business leader working for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and learned about her project on Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN), a logistics management information system which leveraged peoples, processes, and IoT to capture real-time vaccine logistics data across the entire vaccine cold chain, until the last-mile health facilities. Towards the end of the interview, Dr. Shalini also shared the key areas of improvement in the current healthcare system, to better equip for pandemics like Coronavirus COVID-19.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations in 2015, as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. These 17 SDGs are integrated—that is, they recognize that action in one area will affect outcomes in others and that development must balance social, economic and environmental sustainability.
As the lead UN development agency, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is well-placed to help implement the SDGs in some 170 countries and territories. UNDP supports countries in achieving the SDGs through integrated solutions. UNDP solves complex challenges focusing on systems, root causes and connections between challenges—to build solutions that respond to people’s daily realities.¹
Dr. Shalini Verma holds postgraduate degrees in Statistics and in Population Studies and a Ph.D. in Population Studies. She has worked in the health sector for over two decades, providing technical support on research, monitoring and evaluation, and program development in the field of health and social development. She has planned and executed a variety of research and evaluation studies and is well versed in ensuring robust, routine monitoring for results-based management.
Below are a few snippets from my interview with Dr. Shalini Verma:
Me: Could you share a brief about your career trajectory and your motivation behind it?
Dr. Shalini: I wanted to do something which would cause an impact on society and also fulfill my learning experience. Even before I completed my graduation in Statistics, I started looking forward to getting into research. Post my Masters, I went ahead to research in the field of demography and started working in the NGO sector. It was a very enriching experience for me both in terms of learning and the fact that my work was affecting so many people. It allowed me to connect with the realities of life, challenges faced by people and helped me understand how information gathering and research could be used for society’s betterment.
For instance, the first program I worked in was the provision of safe abortion services in India. It allowed me to connect with women and understand the difficult times they face during an abortion. I realized that the lack of numbers in a populated country like India was one of the most crucial challenges needed to overcome the lack of accessibility to contraception.
This furthered my roots in the development sector concerning a child's health, women's health, and women's empowerment. Since the beginning, I was into research, monitoring, evaluation and enjoyed doing it. I have done research and monitoring on different levels starting from a small area to a larger area, and now doing at a Country level.
Me: In terms of professional growth, who would be a key person that inspired you? What traits of the person did you find inspirational?
Dr. Shalini: Her name is Madhuri Narayanan. She was the Country Director at IntraHealth International, where I previously worked. Madhuri was very strong in the content or the program information as well as very strong in managing people and getting the best out of them. Despite all this, Madhuri was very humble, very polite and an extremely down to earth individual. She had a rare combination of the technical rigor and personal traits which is something I looked up to become like her.
Me: What are you currently working on and how are you leveraging technology to enhance the workflow?
Dr. Shalini: In my current role, I am leading on the monitoring and evaluation of the ‘Health Systems Strengthening (HSS)’ project, funded by the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative (Gavi) at UNDP. The project is strengthening the Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India. The project has successfully rolled out ‘eVIN - Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network’, an online real-time vaccine logistic management system, across all the 624 districts of 30 states and union territories of India. The project digitized the paper-based Vaccine logistics management system using the Internet of Things (IoT). I conceptualized and implemented baseline surveys of 27,000 public health facilities hosting Immunization Cold Chain Points and utilized the data for eVIN. Post the eVIN rollout, I ensure regular monitoring of the programme and processes for results-based management and progress reporting from UNDP. We run analytics on collected data to make crucial logistical and strategic decisions.
It is well documented that the vaccine supply chain in India supports the largest immunization programme in the world and in addition to the difficulties of a vast and diverse country, vaccine management in India is challenged by the fact that programme managers do not have real-time visibility of stock supplies and storage temperature of the vaccines across the health centers.² UNDP is supporting the Government of India to ensure the efficient and timely supply of vaccines until the “last mile” to improve access for the most hard-to-reach populations. In 2015, in partnership with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, UNDP supported the Government of India to launch the electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN), an electronic logistics management information system (eLMIS) that uses a smartphone and cloud-based technology to capture real-time data across the entire vaccine cold chain, from the central store depots to the last-mile health facilities.
eVIN project has introduced an integrated solution to vaccine supply chain management in India, combining the use of new technology with capacity-building to strengthen governance and human resources for logistics management at all levels of the chain. It includes an easy-to-use mobile phone application that allows cold chain handlers to report data on vaccine stocks, consumption, and movement, along with SIM-enabled temperature loggers attached to cold chain equipment. The data collected through this IoT technology is stored in a cloud server that provides web-based dashboards and data analytics for technicians, programme managers, and policymakers to view the information in real-time. End-to-end visibility of key supply chain data allows stakeholders to effectively manage and make decisions on logistics management operations to ensure that vaccines reach patients when, where, and in the quality that they are needed.³
Me: With regards to health monitoring, what are your thoughts on monitoring of Coronavirus COVID-19 cases and what do you believe could be an area of development?
Dr. Shalini: In developing countries like India, the reported numbers of Coronavirus cases are so low, not because of the lower incidence of disease but due to weak recording and reporting systems. With my experience in the Healthcare industry, I can sense that the numbers are not so low. The reason it’s difficult to capture the actual numbers is that most of the people do not attend the public health system and among those attended, the health management information system isn’t advanced enough to test and report them all.
Me: According to you what steps could be taken to ensure a more efficient data collection and monitoring in response to pandemic outbreaks like the Coronavirus COVID-19?
Dr. Shalini: The key public data collection systems in India like civil registration, vital statistics, Health Management Information System (HMIS), Disease Surveillance Systems are turning digital but need strengthening from the grassroots. This process needs to be accelerated. Also, these numerous systems should speak to each other so that the government can use their collective information for decision making.
With the onset of digitization in India, there are a lot of old systems that have become redundant and a lot of newer systems that are in the making. If we can leverage existing infrastructure setup that was built for old systems and digitize it to run newer systems, then we can save an enormous amount of cost and time. For instance, India has the most widely distributed postal network in the world. The government could use the existing postal network and convert them into hubs for the collection of local area information— collating local data from various departments such as vital events (death, birth, marriages, etc), health, education, employment, and provide them to local authorities for decision making.
Me: While growing as a business leader what is the most important lesson that you learned?
Dr. Shalini: In a male-dominated work environment a lot of working women hesitate to make their work-life a priority. They tend to stress about the difficulties that she might face while juggling her personal-work-family life. However, women are blessed to have unlimited potential. If need be, the woman is more than efficient in wearing the hats of a daughter, a wife, a mother, while being a successful business leader. A woman should not doubt her capabilities and make the best use of her talent and skills.
Me: “If you could relive life, what would you do differently? What things would you change?
Dr. Shalini: It’s very simple. “Nothing”. “I believe while growing through life, often there are times when we are stuck in a situation or disappointed with a specific outcome. We wish for an alternate result. However, as I grew and when I look back 10 years down the line I realize that whatever happened, happened for the best. Every problem came with a solution, and often it came with time. In the end, all the dots in a person’s life add up to explain the trajectory and to shape the current reality. And even though I might have not been that happy when certain things happened, today, when I look back- I’m extremely happy and content with how things turned out.”
As per a report on Statista, the healthcare-related IoT revenues are projected to go over 135 billion by 2025.⁴
IoT in healthcare will have immense benefits which include remote monitoring, reporting, end-to-end connectivity, alerting and supply chain management. It will not only reduce the costs but will also ensure efficiency by reducing human-generated errors throughout the process. In a developing country like India, with a population of over 1.3 billion digitizing the Healthcare systems is going to play a major role. The country needs more initiatives like eVIN and business leaders like Dr. Shalini Verma who is spearheading the digitization in Healthcare.
The impact of a pandemic like Coronavirus COVID-19 forces us to think in a disruptive way. We have a huge population, and unless we digitize the existing processes and leverage upcoming technologies like IoT, neither we can handle such pandemics nor we can manage the public health challenges. -Dr. Shalini Verma
References:
¹ https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals.html
² https://www.undp-capacitydevelopment-health.org/en/capacities/focus/innovation-and-technologies/digitizing-the-supply-chain/the-electronic-vaccine-ntelligence-etwork-evin-in-india/
³ https://www.undp-capacitydevelopment-health.org/en/capacities/focus/innovation-and-technologies/electronic-vaccine-intelligence-network/how-evin-works-and-what-evin-does/
⁴ The Insight Partners. (December 19, 2016). The projected size of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the healthcare market worldwide from 2016 to 2025 (in billion U.S. dollars) [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved April 13, 2020, from https://www-statista-com.ezproxy.babson.edu/statistics/997959/worldwide-internet-of-things-in-healthcare-market-size/
(Link to the original article here)