https://ift.tt/2zaxEZA

Business Wire India

This press release has been reissued because of some updates in the original post, distributed on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 10:00 AM IST.

When it comes to any public campaign in India, the sheer size of the population always presents its own unique challenges. The COVID-19 vaccination program is no different. In addition to manufacturing problems, the Indian vaccination drive has been hobbled by a lack of distribution efficiency, with oversupply to certain areas—resulting in expired doses—undersupply to others, counterfeiting, and damage during transit.

But mid this year, this distribution problem was considerably smoothed out with the introduction of revolutionary technology developed by a homegrown startup, StaTwig.

StaTwig’s technology solution, called Vaccine Ledger, uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT (internet of things), and Blockchain-based information tracking technology to follow every vial from source to destination—during transit and at all checkpoints.

A chip or barcode on the vial can be used to transfer information such as serial numbers, expiry date, storage condition data, location, price, and so on, through the internet to an open source platform where it is recorded via the Blockchain in a series of openly viewable, real time updates that are also immutable and authenticated.

This means that every stakeholder in the value chain already has the information they need at their fingertips; immediate preventive and corrective action can be taken where needed to reduce wastage and solve problems; and there can be no counterfeiting.

By using the latest technology in information recording and storage, one catch-all application can make the supply chain more efficient, trustworthy, transparent, and authentic. What’s more: it is compatible with existing systems and takes minimal effort to implement.

As a part of the UNICEF Innovation Fund Portfolio, StaTwig began developing this tech to tackle value chain problems with perishable goods such as food products, seeing massive success with reducing wastage with every distribution cycle. Since then, they have been working to reshape, redesign, and re-engineer the value chain for all products to prevent losses and maximize efficiency in the marketplace. Now, with Vaccine Ledger, there has been great success as well.

Recognizing that vaccine loss along the value chain is a global problem—millions of vaccines have expired in the African continent and nearly a thousand New Yorkers were vaccinated with expired doses—StaTwig has taken the Vaccine Ledger from India to the global stage. They are currently collaborating with Latin American LACChain Alliance to deploy their tech to 26 Latin American countries.

Sid Chakravarty, Founder CEO of StaTwig, says: “By 2023, if we are supporting even 10–20% of the total global COVID-19 vaccine volume, that would be around 1 billion doses going through our platform, a huge success for us.”
 
In a time of vaccine shortages, we cannot afford to lose any doses if we are to beat the COVID-19 pandemic. With StaTwig’s technology, all the decision makers along the vaccine value chain have the information they need to make sure that this is the case.

Advertisements

Post a Comment

Comment

Previous Post Next Post