Improving Person Centered Care Using a Digital Team-Based Care Approach : Exploring How Digital Tools Can Address Immunization Coverage in Hard-to-Reach Populations

Overview & Synopsis

Ensuring equitable access to quality health services across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remains a persistent challenge. Gaps in service delivery - from routine vaccinations to maternal health, nutrition, and primary care - contribute to preventable illness and death. Despite major investments and progress particularly in areas such as immunization, which alone prevents an estimated 4 million deaths each year, millions of children and families still lack access to the full spectrum of care they need.1 Children who miss out on services altogether, categorized as zero-dose in the context of immunization, are frequently the same as the individuals who are underserved across the broader health system. This situation has been exacerbated by two key factors. One factor is the shortage of health workers in many LMICs. The significant disparity between supply and demand has resulted in overworked health workers who grapple with challenging working conditions, including disproportionately large patient populations. As a consequence, they are likely to overlook the hard-to-reach households who live far from main roads, are skeptical of healthcare workers, or are often away from home. Compounding this situation is the fragmented quality of the current provider-centered care and digital workflow. Health providers - operating through independent care delivery networks composed of different government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and private providers - keep their own health records and track metrics related to their own job duties. Data is often not shared or coordinated across systems. Within the context of immunization, siloed health interventions attempting to identify and refer children at the community level are consequently not linked to vaccination facilities, thereby impeding meaningful improvements in coverage. Under this disconnected provider-centered approach, caregivers bear the onus of accommodating health teams in order to obtain the necessary vaccinations for their children.