VaxTrac

Our Challenge

Vaccination is arguably the single most important health innovation in our history. We've turned deadly, endemic diseases that once ravaged entire civilizations into nothing more than scary stories. Because of vaccination, there have been no cases of smallpox since 1977 and Polio is also on the brink of eradication.

Governments and organizations like the WHO, GAVI Alliance, UNICEF and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have worked hand in hand over the past several decades, greatly improving the availability of elementary medicine for developing nations. Still children are dying every day from diseases that can easily be prevented. The astounding improvements of the last 30 years have plateaued due to currently unaddressed obstacles in the vaccine delivery system. Despite all the money and focus poured into vaccination, a full 24 million children born this year won't be fully vaccinated. Of those, 2.5 million will die before the age of 5.

The intuitive answer to the problem is to buy more vaccines. However, vaccine wastage rates are higher than 50% in some of the most challenging geographies. For every $100 in new vaccines purchased, $50 will never go into the arm of a child in need.

Two of the primary drivers of the current inefficiency in the vaccine delivery system are a poor distribution system and ineffective tracking and reporting. The current vaccine delivery model often employs untrained health-workers covering large areas. These health-workers are excellent at reaching places previously unserviced. However, they have no advance knowledge of the number or vaccination status of potential patients. The lack of provider-based medical records means that the only immunization records are kept on paper vaccine cards, which are given to patients. These vaccine cards have been proven to be grossly ineffective way of discerning immunization status as they are easily lost and most often the recipients are given no context to understand their value.

Consequently, vaccine administrators rarely have the ability to concretely determine which vaccines a patient has received. In the face of uncertainty, health workers resort to fully re-immunizing the child. In a limited supply environment, every vaccine that is administered unnecessarily directly leads to another child going without immunity. It is this exact approach that has been both successful in raising coverage levels to their current plateau and inhibiting them from rising further. With new medicines increasing the vaccination cost per child 50% by 2015, it’s imperative that we control wastage to give every child the opportunity to grow up healthy.