VaccineLedger: Ensure quality and safety of the vaccines

Backed by UNICEF Venture Fund and Gavi Infuse, VaccineLedger is a blockchain-based supply chain solution that tracks every single vial of vaccine along its journey from a manufacturer to a beneficiary. 

Sid Chakravarthy

One out of three vaccines get wasted in the supply chains as per WHO reports published in 2018. With COVID-19 vaccine deliveries world wide this would lead to at least 6 billion vaccines getting wasted in the next two years. This accounts to nearly USD 30 billion in loses. 

These failures also have ripple effect as they further disrupt the routine immunization programs leading to re-emergence of vaccine preventable diseases. 

Saving a fraction of these vaccines from going to waste means that more people can get vaccinated soon. This will help us to control the pandemic sooner and save lives. A majority of these failures can be prevented with modern data tools that can give continuous visibility of the condition of the vaccines while they are in storage or in-transit. 

However, there is a problem. Most traditional supply chain tools that are used today operate in data silos and incapable of providing continuous visibility of the products. They only collect data for a small segment of the supply chains and this data is usually unusable by other stakeholders of the supply chains. There is a clear and immediate need for a solution that would solve this problem. 

Our solution assists vaccine suppliers, public and private health departments, and other key stakeholders to ensure quality and safety of the vaccines. 

UNICEF, Gavi who help distribute nearly 80% of global vaccines by volume have supported our solution since 2018. UNICEF Venture Fund invested in our startup twice so far and we have signed a Long Term Agreement(LTA) with UNICEF in September 2020. 

UNICEF Supply Division, which oversees procurement and distribution of vaccines worldwide benefits from using our solution to get continuous visibility and traceability of the vaccines at country, regional and PHC and CHC levels. The UNICEF country offices and Government Health Departments  also benefit as their suppliers who are upstream and their implementation partners downstream are all on one single decentralized app making it easy for them to collaborate. 

Apart from UNICEF, we are already working with Central and two Indian state governments(Telangana and Maharashtra) to improve vaccine supply visibility in India. Soon partnering with Inter-American Development Bank(IADB) for deployments in Latin America. 

UNICEF mentored to develop and deploy our solution. We completed many pilots in different countries to collect data and gather feedback from the immunization teams. We used this data and feedback to improve our product.                                                                                                                                                                                       

StaTwig and its solution VaccineLedger are both recognized by the "Digital Public Good" by the Digital Public Good Alliance(DPGA). The DPGA is governed by an Interim Strategy Group consisting of: The Government of Sierra Leone; The Government of Norway; iSPIRT; and UNICEF. Day to day functions are steered by the Secretariat of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, which is co-hosted by UNICEF and Norad.

We have also received funding UNICEF two types for the development of Digital Public Goods and we went through UNICEF's thorough review process during qualification and graduation stages. 

The results of this funding is an open source project. The links of these projects have been shared above. 

Our solution ensures both safety and quality of the vaccines. This means less vaccines are wasted and more people are vaccinated. Our solution also helps governments to distribute the vaccines quickly and more efficiently. This will help us recover from the pandemic. 

More importantly, our solution was started pre-pandemic to build resilient and sustainable healthcare supply chains. One of the areas we were focusing on before the pandemic was availability of vaccines to children in need. The big problem was that one out of five children were not getting vaccinated leaving them vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases. Today, due to pandemic most of the routine immunization programs are disrupted leading to more children not getting vaccinated. 

We were working with UNICEF and Gavi for the last few years to develop a system that connects all the touchpoints in the supply chains right from manufacturers to the beneficiaries. This end-to-end system creates visibility and transparency that helps improve the supply chains and help vaccines reach more children annually. 

We have a clear pathway for scaling. We are focused on two channels: UNICEF and Direct. Through UNICEF channel we have already received strong interest for our solution from countries such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, Kenya, Morocco, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. We are planning to deploy in 25 UNICEF countries by 2022. 

We are also making good progress through direct channels. Indian government's two departments, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare(MoHFW) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) have shortlisted our solution to integrate with Cowin to enhance it. Cowin is the digital solution that India has rolled out for handling COVID-19 vaccine deliveries throughout the country. Separately, two state governments Telangana and Maharashtra have selected to deploy VaccineLedger for getting deeper insights into the supply chains. In the next two years we want to scale this to 10 states in India. 

We have also built strong relationship with Inter-American Development Bank(IADB) which is scaling our solution to Latin American countries. 

KPIs for VaccineLedger

Serial Number

Process Area

KPI

KPI Description

1

Serialization

Aggregation

Capture Aggregation Data of Serialization based on primary, secondary and tertiary packaging formats

2

Serialization

Disaggregation

Capture Disaggregation data in the extended supply chains

3

Packaging

Number of Scans per unit

For each package number of times the 2D barcode has been scanned at various touchpoints in the supply chain using the VaccineLedger App

4

Shipping

###p#< delayed shipments

Capture real-time data on delayed shipments

Cold Chain Failures

Predict and Prevent Cold Chain Failures. This KPI tracks all the potential failures in the supply chains.

5

Sales

products expired

Describes the count of products expired in a location in the extended supply chain

Safety Incidents

Describes detected incidents of counterfeiting in the supply chains

Valid Returns

Describes the total count of verifiable returns in each location in the extended supply chain.