Awards

Amanda Odum of the Research Triangle Institute in the U.S. will develop a mobile Application, TraceRX, to record and track drugs donated to mass drug administration campaigns in Nigeria to ensure the right drugs are in the right place at the right time. Donated drugs are currently monitored by paper methods, basic software programs, or local pharmacists, which leads to inaccurate ordering, expired drugs, and stockouts. They will design an Application for Android devices that will enable scanning of received drugs to record the type, origin, and expiry date, provide alerts so that drugs approaching expiration can be prioritized for use, record consumption, and track the full supply chain. They will also develop a dashboard for program managers to visualize the data to easily forecast need and communicate any required changes.

Aleta Williams of FHI Partners LLC in the U.S. will design, build, and test a mobile, digital tally counter for community drug distributors to accurately record data during mass drug administration campaigns for neglected tropical diseases in rural and deprived communities. Currently, these data are generally captured on paper, which is inefficient, prone to errors, and difficult to share. They will use a human-centered design approach to produce a prototype tally counter that can record essential information including GPS coordinates during campaigns, and test their performance and acceptability with stakeholders and end-users.

Justin Cohen of the Clinton Health Access Initiative Inc in the U.S. will develop a user-friendly electronic data collection tool using an open source platform and spatial intelligence to better monitor mass drug administration campaigns in schools and in the community. Their platform integrates population mapping with field data collection processes to accurately calculate intervention coverage, such as the distribution of bed-nets or administered drugs, in near real-time. They will adapt the platform so it can be tested during two specific neglected tropical disease campaigns in Eswatini and Zambia. The platform will enable data collection on numbers of available doses and treatments, and incorporate a dashboard and maps to visualize the collected data and inform local and national decision-makers on campaign progress and to identify areas that need better coverage.