In December 2022, the eSHIFT Partner Network held the first meeting of the AMR Surveillance Platform Expert Advisory Group (EAG). The goal of the EAG will be to advise, inform and support the evolution and growth of our Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) One Health Surveillance Platform, one of several verticals within the AoS Health Initiative. The EAG includes hand-picked representatives from five advisory domains: AMR Expertise, NGO Partners, Cross-Sectoral Collaboration (One Health/ quadripartite), Technical Expertise (epidemiology, data science, surveillance and technology), and Country Representatives. Over the course of a year, the EAG will focus on establishing a roadmap for system improvements, designing long-term multi-country implementations, and facilitating global AMR community engagements.
Since 2018, in collaboration with our partners at the AoS Health Initiative, eSHIFT has been developing, refining and deploying what we hope to be an emerging reference platform for countries to increase the maturity of AMR tracking and monitoring. Born from decades of digital health implementation experience in low- and middle-income country environments, the aim of the AMR One Health Surveillance Platform is to improve efficiency and expand the capacity of digital health implementations (both early-stage and longstanging) and expedite the move up the maturity curve for health data insight, allowing our country partners to jump-start their digital health infrastructure capabilities.
AoS Health began under a Global AMR Innovation Fund (GAMRIF, UK Government) grant, during which a pilot system was developed and implemented in Zambia and Senegal. In 2021 the capabilities of the AoS Health AMR Surveillance System were expanded and the platform implemented in Nepal and Kenya, under the Fleming Fund regional grant programme. Currently at a critical stage of growth, the introduction of a cross-sectoral EAG will allow us to harness our members’ collective expertise to expedite platform capabilities and global reach in order to achieve our goal of developing the ‘reference’ “One Health” country solution for the AMR domain.