Information Sharing and Supply Chain Performance: Evidence from the Neglected Tropical Diseases Preventative Chemotherapy Supply Chain

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) contribute billions of donated medicines to Mass Drug Administrations (MDAs) in support of the World Health Organization’s “Roadmap to Implementation,” which outlines targets to control, eliminate, and eradicate Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). The supply chain to deliver these medications is challenging due to the many stakeholders and partnerships involved, and more complicated by delivery to remote destinations in developing countries. In September 2016, an online supply chain performance measurement system (SCPMS), “NTDeliver,” was launched to aggregate and share data to enhance information sharing and transparency. This paper empirically studies whether and how the introduction of SCPMS can improve the performance of the humanitarian pharmaceutical donation supply chain for NTDs. We collect a secondary data set from SCPMS and use regression models to empirically study the impact of information sharing on the performance of NTD Supply Chain. We find that information sharing via SCPMS can improve delivery timeliness and demand forecasting accuracy, but this impact may vary across different countries or disease types. Our results may help United Nations, the pharmaceutical companies and the related countries to better manage the pharmaceutical donation supply chain for NTDs and may consequently shorten waiting time for the patients in these countries.