Industry: Nonprofit
Location: Los Angeles, California
Nexleaf is on a mission to preserve human life and protect our planet by designing sensor technologies, generating data analytics, and advocating for data-driven solutions to empower low-to-middle income countries (LMICs). Like PagerDuty, Nexleaf believes in the power of timely, accurate, and actionable data, particularly to address global health challenges. The organization was one of the first recipients of PagerDuty.org’s Time Critical Health grants, these unrestricted funds are designed to support nonprofits working to save lives by reaching people faster.
Unrestricted funding is key to Nexleaf’s approach to innovation and iteration, which allows the organization to listen to end users, understand their needs, and respond to emergent issues as they arise. This is exactly what the organization did when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, adapting their ColdTrace technology to the needs of public hospitals and health clinics in LMICs.
ColdTrace was originally designed as a wireless remote temperature monitoring (RTM) solution for vaccine refrigerators. The system is low-cost and fully customizable, with the needs of Ministries of Health in mind. ColdTrace collects critical data and provides customizable analytics and report-generating tools to empower health workers, inform decision-makers, and improve overall cold chain performance. ColdTrace technology has primarily been used in the vaccine supply chain to protect vaccines for infants, and has been deployed to 16,000 healthcare facilities in 26 countries. Currently, ColdTrace protects the vaccine supply chain for 1 in 10 babies born on earth each year.
When COVID-19 hit, Nexleaf began exploring how ColdTrace could be used as a proxy to monitor power availability since consistent electricity is key to powering ventilators, oxygen concentrators, and other lifesaving equipment to treat patients with severe COVID-19 infections. The new system, currently being tested with healthcare partners in Kenya, includes power outage alerts and an escalation protocol to help staff understand when the power has gone out and how to restore power to the clinic. By leveraging PagerDuty’s incident response platform, Nexleaf will be able to enhance the delivery of power outage alerts and make them more useful for healthcare workers on the ground.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought to light and exacerbated many systemic healthcare issues, particularly in LMICs. Yet, Nexleaf has found that the pandemic also presents new opportunities to address these issues head-on. PagerDuty.org is excited to support Nexleaf in its work solving some of the most pressing problems in global public health—problems that can’t be ignored any longer.