The Total Systems Effectiveness (TSE) project, under development by the World Health Organization (WHO), aims to:
(i) establish a structured and transparent vaccine product selection process at the country level; and
(ii) leverage this process to build a platform for stakeholders in low and middle income country (LMIC) immunisation programmes to inform vaccine supply and R&D priorities.
Development of TSE, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), has been underway since December 2017. The first phase of the pilot (December 2017 – September 2018) focused on the country use case for TSE, and was overseen by a TSE Steering Committee formed of the original partners involved in the planning and conceptualization of the overall approach. During this phase, a process and tools were developed for country use, and the last Steering Committee in September 2018 culminated in a review of lessons learned and future directions for the project (TSE Steering Committee Meeting 8).
This next phase of the TSE pilot will continue to develop tools for country evaluation of vaccine products, but a major focus will be to develop the R&D use case for TSE – specifically this phase will evaluate how the tools and process developed for countries can inform R&D. A component of this will be the conceptualization of an information system that captures information from country input, for to infrom R&D. As such, the original TSE Steering Committee has been reconfigured with members that can over input into all aspects of the future TSE workstreams, namely the country and R&D use cases as well as the data information system.
