Measuring and analyzing the launch and scale of life saving health interventions: A user guide
Creators: name: Center, Duke Global Health Innovation
Publisher: name: Gates Open Research
Year: 2023

description: The Launch and Scale Speedometer aims to accelerate the introduction and uptake of lifesaving health interventions, primarily products such as drugs, devices, diagnostics, and vaccines in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), by developing evidence-based actionable insights about the timelines, enablers, barriers, and pathways taken by these interventions to reach and sustain reach to intended users. The Duke Global Health Innovation Center (Duke GHIC) developed the Launch and Scale Speedometer framework to collect and analyze data to facilitate insights to accelerate the scaling of life-saving interventions. To date, the Speedometer program has collected data on over 50 interventions to understand their scaling timelines. This data and analyses are available on the Duke GHIC website (dukeghic.org). The Speedometer program has systematically analyzed the pathways, timespans, and influencing characteristics that accelerate the introduction and scaling of interventions. We intend for Speedometer resources and tools to be a global public good, and will continue to collect and analyze data to address the global need to accelerate scaling of life-saving health interventions. We hope that researchers, innovators, development organizations, and others will contribute to the database over time to increase its collective value.<br> <br> The Speedometer achieves its goals by:<br> <br> • Cultivating a community of global stakeholders to provide guidance to the work and build consensus on framework and metrics;<br> • Collecting launch and scale data and evidence—from proof of concept to global scale-up—on health interventions and developing a data clearinghouse as a public good; and<br> • Generating and sharing valuable insights and good practices to advocate for the acceleration of launch and scale of lifesaving health interventions and products at global and country levels.<br> <br> <b>Applications of the Speedometer Framework</b><br> <br> The Speedometer Framework is designed for both retrospective and prospective data collection, to consistently measure and effectively organize data around pathways of scaling health interventions. It offers point- in-time measurement for specific milestones and longitudinal measurement to look at the introduction and scale-up of an intervention over time, thereby facilitating greater awareness of the overall process. By applying the Speedometer Framework, funders, researchers, and product developers will be able to measure and analyze the specific pathways, timelines, and key factors associated with the scale-up of health interventions. Analyzing this information will generate key insights to pinpoint opportunities for maintaining or accelerating the introduction and uptake pathways of interventions.<br> <br> The Speedometer Framework can be used to:<br> <br> • Track and facilitate understanding of characteristics of enablers and obstacles to scale<br> • Benchmark milestones, timespans of activities, and comparisons across products<br> • Understanding how fast (the speed at which) activities occur. Note that ‘fast’ is not necessarily better, but understanding timelines of launch and scale gives an idea of how long it may take an intervention to reach end users.<br> • Enable investment scoping and selection<br> • Provide portfolio view and measurement of launch and scale<br> • Assist planning and monitoring of intervention introduction and uptake<br> • Measure longitudinal scale-up<br> • Support retrospective and prospective evaluation of end-to-end scaling journey<br> • Support product designer and implementing agencies in their design of new innovations that take account of delineated barriers (or enablers) in the design process and implementation plans<br> <br> This Framework presents an opportunity to donors, product developers, and researchers to understand and track the scaling pathways of health interventions – either individual interventions or comprehensive portfolios. While audiences may be interested in a unique phase of the scaling pathway, this Framework can provide an informational bridge and feedback loop for the complete end-to-end pathway of launch and scale. Prospective data collection approaches can track “growth” of a portfolio of interventions, capturing the launch and scale pathways of both successful and unsuccessful interventions. Retrospective data collection can offer insight to benefit new products, accelerating progress at lower cost. Additionally, this Framework offers a unique opportunity to closely connect with key stakeholders at the data collection stage and generate real-time actionable insights to affect the launch and scale process. Reflecting this use, real-time insights were able to be drawn from the aggregation of COVID-19 vaccine purchasing data by countries thus helping identify disparities in purchases, which, given the initial manufacturing constraints showed supply being sent to high- income countries over low-income countries.<br> <br> Based on the results of this analysis, subsequent data collection focused on vaccine donations, leveraging the data to call attention to vaccine purchasing and distribution inequities (Taylor, Biru, &amp; Udayakumar, 2022). Additional collective value will be developed through contribution and aggregation of<br> additional data over time, enabling more robust analyses to provide key insights to accelerate scaling of life-saving interventions.