Health tech startup Field Intelligence is working collaboratively with African governments and community pharmacies to create an integrated, digital health supply chain
African governments have struggled with severe COVID-19 vaccine wastage, with approximately 2m destroyed and pharmaceutical product wastage in the millions.
Part of the issue is that 80 per cent of supplies are imported and many expire on container ships. But there are also serious inefficiencies within healthcare systems that impact the most vulnerable.
Field Intelligence, a health tech start-up based in Nigeria and Kenya, is working collaboratively with African governments to scale and deliver healthcare programmes and overcome infrastructure, budget, and human resource constraints.
It is also supporting Africa’s independent and franchise pharmacies by providing technology-enabled tools for data, inventory and access to capital
Health Tech World spoke with Field Intelligence CTO Justin Lorenzon.
HTW: How did you get into this business?
JL: “My background is in software engineering, actually. I spent years doing stuff in food supply chains around the chain of custody.
“I took a bit of a detour and worked on some social enterprise projects in Southeast Asia, I was really fascinated by how small scale enterprises could have a positive impact on community development and through that, I wound up working on public health projects in Sub Saharan Africa.
“I worked on projects around polio and ebola, specifically involved in or specifically related to health tech or information systems to help manage the responses to these kinds of emergencies.
“That was even years ago, and it was through that work that we realised how key the supply chain element actually is.
“There are all these amazing life-saving commodities, such as vaccines and antibiotics. There are plenty of parties that are willing to procure them, whether that’s on the private sector side, in the form of community pharmacists, or in the public sector side.
“And yet, the availability on the ground is really poor. So, you’ve got situations where only about 50 per cent of public health facilities in the area have these antibiotics available and given time.
“So you’re in this strange situation where there are these commodities that can save lives and make a huge impact but you can’t get them on the ground.
“We looked at this in our emergency response work and identified it as a key problem to solve. Because if we can fill that gap in the supply chain, we can solve that availability problem.”
[activecampaign form=11]That sounds like a big undertaking, where did you begin?
JL: “The supply chain issue is not new, there are billions of dollars worth of software and systems and tools out there to support this kind of thing.
“We tried working on some projects to implement some off-the-shelf systems to support it. But we quickly realised the tech wasn’t appropriate for the situation, because these systems are generally designed for supply chain professionals with 24/7 Internet connections.
“So we were in this almost laughable situation where we were trying to do something simple in a warehouse, like put a new delivery of stock away, and we were running around with a laptop and a phone trying to get a reliable signal just so we could update the list of available products.
“So from that work came our product, Field Supply, which was designed to address some of those gaps and really work in situations where you didn’t have that infrastructure.
HTW: What work did you do with the African governments?
JL: “In the public sector, we had gotten involved with the project that was led by the Nigerian government to pull together a bunch of different national scale public health programmes and partners around a consolidated supply chain. This was a unique situation, it was kind of an amazing thing to get everybody to agree to coordinate on this.
“We were involved in putting together the control tower using Field Supply, which works on any smartphone as long as it has a browser. It utilises new web technology that supports things like offline functionality and data replication technology to allow us to sync all of the work that had been done offline when the user gets back online.
“So we provided the tools that were built for working offline. And through that project, we formed it into a control tower that allowed donors and national administrators to get visibility over the whole network.
“And through that, we ended up scaling it nationally across other programmes including HIV, malaria, family planning and maternal, newborn and child health.”
HTW: How did that differ from your work with independent and franchised pharmacies?
JL: “So we started out in the public sector and realised that it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Because if you kind of look at health-seeking behaviour across Sub Saharan Africa, for 80 per cent of people their first contact with the health system is actually from their community, pharmacists.
“They don’t go into a hospital or public health facility, they’re just going down the street and talking to the pharmacist.
“Pharmacies have a largely different set of challenges, it’s not just that there’s a central supply chain to manage, they’re not going to just log into a system and start doing supply chain management for their own store,
“We realised that we had to package this up into a service to address their particular needs. So two years ago we created a service called Shelf Life.
“It bundles, the planning with the analytics and financing. And we provide a vendor managed inventory model where we put the stock on the shelf they pay us when they sell it.
“Which is hugely valuable in places where they don’t have ready access to bank loans and other reasonable forms of financing, it sort of de-risks a lot of things. And so we’ve seen pharmacists stocking things that they otherwise wouldn’t have.
“We’re really betting on the community pharmacists to succeed and to start new branches. And we think that’s going to be a really key part of helping flesh out and deepen the resilience of these health systems.”
HTW: Do you think this kind of scope for it to expand beyond African countries?
JL: “I don’t see why not. But to be honest, there’s lots of work to do in Africa. Half of Nigeria is under the age of 18 so the scale of growth happening here is just extraordinary and the needs are growing.
“We’re definitely looking to roll out Shelf Life and Field Supply across the continent in the next few years.”
