Public health campaigns are time-bound activities that aim to respond to disease outbreaks and increase coverage of health interventions. These campaigns can target national or subnational populations and it is an important strategy that can be used to address high priority diseases such as neglected tropical diseases, malaria, polio, malnutrition and other vaccine preventable diseases.
Campaigns in most countries are currently implemented as vertical programs, this has resulted in multiple campaigns being run leading to operational inefficiencies and inequities that can strain health care systems. Other challenges that affect campaigns include lack of timely and quality data, inefficient microplanning, low coverage and delayed payments of health care workers. Digital tools present a key opportunity that can improve the coverage and impact of public health campaigns, support efficiency, and enable real-time monitoring. Digitization of health campaigns requires a holistic design approach to ensure that the entire campaign lifecycle is supported; the digitization should support the following components:
- Macro Planning and microplanning, this allows for the forecasting and estimation of the required resources and the target population.
- Inventory management to provide insights on stock levels to optimize distribution of commodities.
- Campaign service delivery, supervision and performance management.
- Computation of payment based on predefined deliverables and digitization of payments.
- Geo-location enabled household and household members registrations to help in the estimation of the target population.
- Training of health care workers.
Over the past few years, the Kenya Ministry of Health, Clinton Health Access Initiative, World Health organization and other key stakeholders have been working collaboratively to digitize public health campaigns in Kenya. This intervention aims to streamline public health campaigns using digital technologies and promote reuse of campaign digital components to support different health programs campaigns. Through this collaboration, the teams have designed and built a digital health campaign module that has been incorporated into the eCHIS Kenya app. The eCHIS Kenya campaign module supports service delivery, commodity management, training of community health promoters (CHPs) using the in-app training cards and performance management. In December 2024, the digital campaign system was piloted in Kakamega County with 110 CHPs involved in mass drug administration to prevent neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The NTD preventive chemotherapy campaign achieved 90% coverage of the target population. The current existing eCHIS Kenya campaign components and workflows have also been reused to support seasonal malaria chemotherapy campaigns.
The insights and feedback shared by eCHIS Kenya users and stakeholders have informed continuous improvement and refinement of CHT. The contact summary improvements that were released recently allows for easy tracking of campaign commodities to provide details of the available stocks in real time and it also allows for displaying/hiding of campaign forms and components.
There is still an increased need from various ministries of health to digitize public health campaigns; the MOH Mali team would like to leverage on CHT and other digital tools to support various malaria prevention interventions such as distribution of insecticide treated bednets and indoor residual spraying. The MOH Kenya team is currently working on enhancing the campaign components to support health campaigns macro planning and micro planning and digitize campaign stipend payments. MOH Uganda has started to explore whether CHT based eCHIS Uganda app can be customized to support long lasting insecticidal nets campaigns.
As demand for health campaigns digitization grows, there is an opportunity to reimagine the way countries can effectively plan and implement public health campaigns through open source platforms. Interoperability between different tools that support distinct campaign stages and other systems like national health data systems, geo-registries, macro planning and micro planning tools would ensure that MOHs are able to generate population and resource projections that are needed to run more accurate, efficient and responsive end to end public health campaigns.
As an open source community, we strive to work together with other open source communities and platforms to help build inclusive and sustainable health systems. CHT currently does not natively support campaign macro planning and micro planning, we are therefore exploring other tools that CHT can interoperate with to support campaign planning and forecasting. We would love to hear from you about the different open source tools that you have used to support health campaigns, planning and micro planning. Please share your recommendations on this thread. 