Introduction The World Health Organization estimates that up to half of vaccines are wasted, however only a minority of mHealth programs in Africa have been directed at vaccine supply chain optimisation. We piloted a novel mHealth solution dependent only on short message services (SMS) technology that allowed workers in rural health centres in Zambia to report vaccine stock levels directly to an online platform. Small airtime incentives were offered to encourage users to engage with the system, as well as weekly reminder messages asking for stock updates. Methods The primary outcome measured was the percentage-of-doses-tracked, calculated over the study period. Each vaccine box was randomly allocated to offer either a standard or double airtime incentive and either weekly or daily reminders, in a 2 x 2 design; ANOVA was used to calculate if any of these factors affected time-to-reply. Results Over the study period, the total percentage-of-doses-tracked was 39.9%. Within the subset of users who sent at least one message to the platform, the percentage-of-doses-tracked was 93.8%. There was no significant difference in average time-to-reply between the standard airtime incentive and double airtime incentive groups, nor was there a significant difference between the standard reminder and daily follow-up reminder groups. Conclusion This pilot study found that in an active subgroup of health workers, an incentivised mHealth solution was able to collect tracking data for 93.8% of doses. More research is needed to identify methods to encourage healthcare workers to engage in timely stock reporting practices.
It is currently not possible to measure the impact of research within a specific region.• There are both practical and philosophical reasons why online views may be preferable to citations for measuring the regional impact of clinical research.• With only a few changes to existing data collection strategies, a new regional impact metric could be created.• A reliable regional impact metric would allow local clinicians to discover practical context-appropriate research and local librarians to identify regionally impactful journals.Google tailors results based on the incoming IP address: you do not receive advertising for companies based in Newcastle when
In our view the fundamental obstacle to open access (OA) is the lack of any incentive-based mechanism that unbundles authors' accepted manuscripts (AMs) from articles (VoRs). The former can be seen as the public good that ought to be openly accessible, whereas the latter is owned by publishers and rightly paywall-restricted. We propose one such mechanism to overcome this obstacle: BitViews. BitViews is a blockchain-based application that aims to revolutionize the OA publishing ecosystem. Currently, the main academic currency of value is the citation. There have been attempts in the past to create a second currency whose measure is the online usage of research materials (e.g. PIRUS). However, these have failed due to two problems. Firstly, it has been impossible to find a single agency willing to coordinate and fund the validation and collation of global online usage data. Secondly, online usage metrics have lacked transparency in how they filter non-human online activity. BitViews is a novel solution which uses blockchain technology to bypass both problems: online AMS usage will be recorded on a public, distributed ledger, obviating the need for a central responsible agency, and the rules governing activity-filtering will be part of the open-source BitViews blockchain application, creating complete transparency. Once online AMS usage has measurable value, researchers will be incentivized to promote and disseminate AMs. This will fundamentally reorient the academic publishing ecosystem. A key feature of BitViews is that its success (or failure) is wholly and exclusively in the hands of the worldwide community of university and research libraries, as we suggest that it ought to be financed by conditional crowdfunding, whereby the actual financial commitment of each contributing library depends on the total amount raised. If the financing target is not reached, then all contributions are returned in full and if the target is over-fulfilled, then the surplus is returned pro rata.
Healthcare-related research is largely regional. Put simply, this is because disease burdens differ between world regions. Even global burdens, such as ischaemic heart disease and cancer, display distinctive characteristics in certain regions that are not seen in others. Regional differences in infrastructure, resources and human capital further compound the differences seen, as they affect the way in which the local scientific community can interact with the local disease burden. As such, it seems fair to assume that healthcare-related research ought to be regionally distributed. Although translation of research between regions can sometimes be done, the larger the gap in infrastructure, resources or human capital between regions, the less likely it is that it can be adequately bridged. A recent example of this pertains to accepted life-saving treatment for sepsis in high-income settings, which had the opposite effect when implemented and evaluated in low-income Zambia. This regionality of clinical medicine is, however, not reflected in academic publishing; the impact of a journal is measured and understood by metrics that use the world as their denominator. Therefore, top medical journals are perceived to be relevant equally to all contexts and regions. However, there is a strong case to be made that this lack of granularity is deleterious, and that the creation of a regional impact metric would place clinicians, researchers, and libraries in a better position to understand which journals are relevant to their context and practice.
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