ideasIdea
A live stock-out map for essential chemotherapy drugs
Hospitals in poorer countries often run out of basic, cheap chemotherapy for weeks. A shared live map of stock levels would let buyers and donors act before a child's treatment is interrupted.
Stock-outs of cisplatin, methotrexate, asparaginase, vincristine, and other generic cytotoxics are common in public hospitals across Africa and parts of Asia, and are a major cause of treatment abandonment and cure-rate loss in curable cancers. Consumption data exists in hospital pharmacies but is not shared. A lightweight reporting system (SMS or app) feeding a regional dashboard, with a buffer-stock fund and a pre-negotiated emergency supplier, would turn reactive shortages into managed ones.
Hypothesis
Districts reporting into a stock-out early-warning system with an emergency buffer will reduce chemotherapy stock-out days per year by at least 60% and reduce documented treatment interruptions.
Rationale
Malaria and HIV programmes cut stock-outs sharply with the same tools (logistics management information systems and buffer stocks). Oncology has never had a programme-level supply chain.
What would test it
Twelve-month pilot in one country with monthly stock-out days, interruption episodes in paediatric ALL and Hodgkin protocols, and cost per averted interruption as endpoints.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Most of the world has almost no cancer care · Seven in ten cancer deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries, where radiotherapy, pathology, surgery and drugs are scarce.
- Data silos · Records, scans, genomes and outcomes sit in separate systems that cannot talk. Every patient's experience is lost to the next.