Infant HIV Diagnostics: Supply Chain in Sub-Saharan Africa
By Sarang Deo, Avidan Har, Bill Shields, Mihir Naware
Kellogg School of Management | January 2012
DOI
www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/case.kellogg.2016.000157/full/html
Citation
Deo, Sarang., Har, Avidan., Shields, Bill., Naware, Mihir. Infant HIV Diagnostics: Supply Chain in Sub-Saharan Africa Kellogg School of Management www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/case.kellogg.2016.000157/full/html.
Copyright
Kellogg School of Management, 2012
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Abstract
Roger Osayende, a former management consultant, must advise the Ministry of Health of Ektu, a fictional country in Central Africa, on how to implement a new point-of-care diagnostic test for infants with HIV. In Ektu, mothers often transmitted HIV infection to infants during pregnancy, delivery, or breastfeeding due to inadequate resources to invest in prevention efforts. The existing procedure to diagnose infants with HIV required collecting dried blood samples at more than two hundred healthcare facilities around the country and transporting them to a central laboratory in the capital for testing. This process was characterized by significant delays due to long transportation times, batching of samples in transportation and processing in the lab, and concomitant congestion in the lab. This delay resulted in loss to follow-up, that is, lost patients due to mothers not collecting their infants' results. A new point-of-care device was about to be introduced, which would obviate the need for this centralized processing and the resulting diagnostic delay. The key decision under consideration is where to place the devices to maximize their effectiveness.

Sarang Deo is a Professor of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business (ISB), where he also serves as the Deputy Dean for Faculty and Research and as the Executive Director of the Max Institute of Healthcare Management (MIHM).

His primary area of research is health care delivery systems. He is interested in investigating the impact of operations decisions on population-level health outcomes. Some of the healthcare contexts that he has studied include the influenza vaccine supply chain and the phenomenon of ambulance diversion in the US, HIV early infant diagnosis networks in sub-Saharan Africa, and formal and informal pathways for tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis in India. He regularly collaborates with international public health funding and implementation agencies such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), and PATH for his research. He currently serves as a member of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on TB (STAG-TB).

Prior to joining ISB, Professor Deo was an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management. He holds a PhD from UCLA Anderson School of Management, an MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, and a B Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Before entering academia, he worked with Accenture as a management consultant.

Sarang Deo
Sarang Deo