ICT and Big Data
IBM to Provide Improved Access to Life-Saving Drugs in Zambia

IBM has announced a partnership with the Zambian Ministry of Health to provide citizens with improved access to 200 life-saving drugs.

Supported by the World Bank, the Department for International Development, UNICEF and London Business School, Zambia’s Medical Stores Limited (MSL) will deploy a new medical supply chain pilot project using sophisticated analytics and mobile technologies to better manage medicine inventory and delivery.

The public health sector in Zambia registers 100,000 deaths annually due to preventable and treatable diseases, IBM says. The goal of the medicine supply chain management project is to save more lives by making medicine widely available when and where it’s needed.

The Ministry of Health is introducing innovative technology to manage a scalable supply chain and control the usage, supply, availability and access to essential medicine within the Zambian health sector. The solution will provide a real-time view of drug usage and stock while analyzing data to identify trends and forecasts to prevent gaps in the medical supply chain.

Using the IBM SPSS medicine supply forecast model, which takes into account local conditions such as the local rainy season, lead time and differences in each district’s demographics, MSL will be able to determine optimized distribution of drugs across an initial 2,190 health centers.

The IBM Analytics capabilities will be integrated with the IBM MobileFirst application development portfolio, enabling staff at health facilities in three Zambian districts to use mobile devices with barcode scanners to record and transmit stock and utilization details to a central inventory control system. This will ensure continued access to vital medication and enhanced understanding of the usage patterns of vital medication, IBM says.

To achieve the best availability of medicine in the health centers, the program will leverage IBM’s ILOG optimization technology to calculate the ideal composition of drug shipments based on available inventory, resources and historical usage. The transparency of the system means that each district will have a real time view of drug stock levels at the clinics and the ability to coordinate the transfer of supplies from one facility to another if required.

The 12-month pilot project begins this month and will free up health facility staff from providing detailed paper stock inventories, allowing them to provide meaningful health care.

In other IBM news, scientists from IBM Research recently announced that they have accidentally discovered a new class of polymer materials that could deliver cheaper, lighter, stronger and recyclable materials ideal for electronics, aerospace, airline and automotive industries. The new materials, created by combining high-performance computing with synthetic polymer chemistry, demonstrate resistance to cracking, strength higher than bone, the ability to reform to their original shape (self-heal), and are completely recyclable back to their starting material. The materials also can be transformed into new polymer structures to further bolster their strength by 50 percent — making them ultra-strong and lightweight.

Earlier this year, IBM received an EPA Climate Leadership Award for “Excellence in Greenhouse Gas Management,” for achieving greenhouse gas reduction goals. The awards recognize and incentivize exemplary corporate, organizational and individual leadership in response to climate change.