What I learned exhibiting our last-mile tracking solution at Merck’s Digital Expo
By: Emily Tunggala
Tags: Nomorentds, Makingschistory, Supplychain, Globalhealth, Lastmile

The Merck Digital Expo in Darmstadt is a two day exhibition featuring 48 innovations built from within Merck, a 350 year old science & technology company started here in Darmstadt. This event hosted over 1,500 visitors in the past two days — all Merck employees from around the world who came to check out the next big thing in digital innovations. There were booths featuring robots (so many robots!), 3D printers that can print livers (yep, human livers), augmented reality that allows you to work in a medicine manufacturing facility without actually being in the manufacturing facility, and more. Our booth featuring NTDeliver’s end-to-end medicine donation tracking platform was different. Amongst the sea of really cool flashy high tech gadgets, we highlighted our simple SMS chat-bot that helps Merck keep track of the numbers of children treated for schistosomiasis (a gnarly parasitic worm disease) with praziquantel (the pill that kills the gnarly worms) donated through Merck’s donation program.

Our booth featured simple photos to illustrate the 7-step process of treating school-aged children for schistosomiasis.

As I reflect on the past two days spent discussing this technology and the purpose behind it, I have 3 main things in my head:

The simpler the better. Tracking medicine donations all the way through the last mile is a big problem that we could have easily engineered a super complex high-tech solution for. Instead, we went with the simplest way forward — text messaging. While a text message chat-bot may not be the flashiest thing at a digital expo, it works.NTDeliver texted over 9,000 Kenyan teachers asking them a series of questions about the distribution of praziquantel during Kenya’s national school-based deworming day, and we saw a response rate over 70%. This simple use of basic technology allows us to learn how many kids were treated for schistosomiasis in near-real time, immediately following each deworming, as opposed to the 12–18 month timeline required by the previous paper-based process. Technology should never be the sole focus. The info I threw out in point #1 was cool and all, but what really matters is that kids are being cured of schistosomiasis, a disease that threatens their shot at a long healthy life. And they’re not being treated by the technology we built, they’re be treated due to the massive collaboration between pharmaceutical companies, shipping providers, global health organizations, ministries of health and education, teachers and a bunch of dorky developers (that’s us). Technology enables us to do great things, but none of it would happen without the people. The importance of understanding the ‘why’ behind what you do. While our booth had big ‘competition’ sitting right between a robot and a virtual reality manufacturing facility, we noticed something unique about the crowd our booth attracted — they stayed. Since this event was hosting only Merck employees, many of these individuals played some part — big or small, direct or indirect — in the development of this medicine. When they learned about the impact their efforts were making they lit up and wanted to know more. The conversations that followed showed their understanding of the technology, how impressed they were at the magnitude of collaboration enabling all the moving pieces to come together, and pride learning that the work they do is making a real difference in the world.

Since 2007, Merck’s donation program has donated 800 million tablets of praziquantel to treat 320 million patients through the World Health Organization. They now commit to donating 250 million tablets per year until this disease has been eliminated throughout all of Africa. NTDeliver, a supply chain information system built on top of the Secure Data Kit platform, has tracked 400 million of these tablets in the past 2 years, 2 million of which were tracked all the way to the mouth of the child during Kenya’s national deworming days in 2018. We plan on expanding this last mile tracking technology into other African countries by building strong relationships with those in-country to pave the way for another successful collaboration.