Pharmaceutical systems in many low- and middle-income countries suffer from poor data availability and accessibility. Typically, data are manually collected at service delivery points and then sent to the district, regional, or Ministry level for processing and storage with the hope that they will be captured electronically and analyzed. However, these collected data often become outdated and are not analyzed or used to inform decision making.
Health systems rely on effective information tools, data management, and analytics to maintain access to safe, effective, and affordable products and services.
USAID MTaPS collaborated with countries to improve their pharmaceutical information systems with a focus on registration of medicines, pharmacovigilance, and inventory management. Here are a few key achievements:
MTaPS helped enhance countries’ information systems for all aspects of pharmaceutical systems, including registration of medicines, pharmacovigilance, supply chain, pharmacy benefits management, and managing hospital assets.
For example in Bangladesh, USAID MTaPS collaborated with Bangladesh’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on a solution to better manage hospital assets. Half of all medical equipment – hospital beds, ventilators, nebulizers, air conditioners, refrigerators, and vehicles – in Bangladesh’s public health facilities goes unused, with some equipment not installed or in disrepair. Facility managers are often unable to keep track of their inventory and what equipment needs work.
In response, MTaPS developed a new centralized, web-based electronic Asset Management System (eAMS) for deploying and managing health facility assets. Now, hospital facility managers can track the functional status of equipment, take action for repairs, decommission equipment, and allocate it to other facilities, thereby reducing unnecessary purchases and donations. This tool helped save money and promote patient access to the treatments they needed when they needed them.
MTaPS supported countries to ensure that pharmaceutical information is available and used. For example, MTaPS collaborated with Nepal’s national medicines regulatory authority—Department of Drug Administration (DDA) – to help them implement a quality management system that securely and systematically stored thousands of hard-copy documents that include applications for the registration and authorization of pharmacies, wholesalers, manufacturers, and products as well as those related to inspection. More specifically, MTaPS installed access-controlled repositories to securely store and index documents for easy retrieval by DDA. This new information system ensured the safekeeping of tens of thousands of documents, promoting increased efficiency as authorized staff can easily retrieve these documents within minutes.
