Data Migration for Cold Chain Inventory Systems

Developing countries face the challenge of migrating their health systems data from disjoint, standalone information sources to modern web-based databases. We study this issue in the domain of immunization logistics by looking at the problem of maintaining a national vaccine cold chain inventory. We present modular components that can be composed to create a migration path from existing spreadsheet inventories to web-based databases and other software tools. Specifically we (1) introduce the Cold Chain Equipment Inventory (CCEI), a new data standard for cold chain inventories that was developed in collaboration with UNICEF, WHO, and NGO cold chain experts, (2) present Data Extractor (Dextra), a tool that facilitates the translation of existing inventories into CCEI, and (3) evaluate CCEI and Dextra by converting multiple real health equipment inventories to a format that can be used by modern database systems. Our findings show that CCEI and Dextra together are capable of transforming a variety of health inventories into formats compatible with existing data management systems such as Open Data Kit (ODK) Tables and District Health Information System (DHIS).