A Non-governmental organization, eHealth Africa in partnership with the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) has piloted a new digital innovation to ensure accurate and effective planning of polio vaccination and other routine immunization activities in Nigeria.

Speaking at the pilot workshop in Kaduna State, the Program Manager of eHealth Africa, Abubakar Shehu, said the name of the digital innovation is Planfeld. He demonstrated the innovation to primary healthcare workers and stakeholders showing how the Planfeld application can be used to develop accurate micro plans and monitor vaccination activities.

Shehu said: “Planfeld application will help develop a micro plan which enables us to know the number of settlements that we are targeting, the number of children in those settlements and what quantity of vaccine we need to plan for that activity.

“Previously, developing a micro plan manually, especially for polio vaccination activities usually takes at least four days but with the digitization of micro plan using technology, it will take only less than 30 minutes.”

According to Shehu, the digitization of micro-planning for vaccination activities will ensure that more settlements are reached with public health interventions. “For immunization to achieve the desired objective, it needs to reach at least 80 per cent of the target population.

“Thus, we decided to develop such an application using technology that can accurately derive a microplan within a very short time.”

The pilot workshop, according to him, will be conducted in Kaduna, Niger, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara states. While appreciating the National and State Primary Healthcare Development Agencies, he said the organisation looks forward to comments and feedback on how to further optimize the Planfeld solution to revolutionize the planning and execution of vaccination efforts.

Also speaking during the workshop, the Kaduna state Team Leader Polio Outbreak Project for SOLINA, Mr Victor Obagunlu Adeleke, from SOLINA Center for International Development and Research, said, the micro plan digitization will save time while ensuring proper resource allocation.

Adeleke said: “Primarily, the fact that there’s going to be a great reduction in time and energy spent in developing micro-plan and considering also the fact that it is not a capital intensive project, makes it easier.

“When you look at the micro-plan development process currently, starting from the settlement down to the ward, to the LGA, to the state, it takes a lot of time to aggregate data from all of these levels.

“This digitization offers real-time analysis where you can know as they are entering the data from the settlement or the ward and you are getting the feedback even at the state level.”

On his part, the Incident Manager Polio Emergency Operations Center EOC, Kaduna State Primary Health Care Development Agency (SPHCDA), Dr Abdullahi Musa Garba, said the digitization process promotes accuracy and improvement in terms of Polio immunization and other related diseases while also minimising errors compared to the manual process conducted in previous activities.

“Currently conventional planning or the system for micro-plans is not an easy process. “So by the time we deploy the use of this digitized micro plan, it will make the work easier for the technical people and the teams that are doing the immunization.”