Half of the world’s population lacks access to essential primary healthcare, including treatment for diarrhea, malaria, family planning, and prenatal care. This gap is particularly acute in remote communities, where an estimated two billion people live outside the reach of any healthcare services. The healthcare workforce shortage, already estimated at nearly 18 million people, has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last Mile Health (LMH) partners with countries to bring high-quality primary healthcare to millions of rural people through teams of community and frontline health workers. LMH’s work began in Liberia’s remote, last mile communities in 2007. To manage the data and reporting needs, Last Mile Data Portal (LMD 1.0) was developed to track LMH organizational and programmatic efforts over time and make data-driven decisions using key performance indicators (KPIs).

LMD 1.0 was built on a set of technologies that work well in low bandwidth environments, which was a primary requirement at the time. However, these technologies require extensive programming for their functionality, which is costly in terms of development and support.

Over the last several years, LMH has gone global, evolving from a small organization directly implementing a community health worker (CHW) program in a single health district in remote Liberia to a global organization supporting community health systems in a diverse set of places (i.e. Ethiopia, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, etc) and contexts. As the organization has evolved, so have its data sources and reporting needs. The costs associated with extending LMD 1.0 to accommodate these new needs is prohibitive. Also, scalability of the current system is s challenge, as the current data warehouse is hosted on a private VPS.

As LMH’s work has grown beyond Liberia, the number of data sources and formats has increased making it difficult to accurately track progress of country programs and make better data-driven decisions from the collected data. To solve this challenge, LMH has embarked on a journey to build a cloud-based next generation data management platform and portal (Last Mile Data 2.0 - LMD 2.0) with analytic capabilities as a long -term solution to be able to extract actionable insights for more precise data-driven decisions.

LMD 2.0 will deliver more functionality, a richer user experience, and a more extensible platform that allow developers and analysts to rapidly develop and deploy data collection, storage, and reporting systems. This work is critical to ensuring high data quality and access to data to support our routine monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities across our growing programing in multiple countries.