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Procurement dashboard for equitable access to COVID-19 diagnostic tests

By Access and Delivery Partnership

Demand for diagnostic tests for COVID-19 has been unprecedented, creating significant procurement challenges for LMICs. Photo: Guido Hofmann on Unsplash

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered demand for diagnostic testing at an unprecedented scale. Decision makers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have faced particularly tough challenges accessing relevant information on quality metrics to inform selection, procurement and deployment decisions as a key part of their strategic pandemic response efforts.

Early in 2020, while diagnostics manufacturers were still struggling to ramp up production capacity of COVID-19 tests to an adequate level, the constrained supply and high demand pushed prices to prohibitive levels for many countries. Soon after, the market was flooded with hundreds of COVID-19 diagnostics tests, spanning different technology platforms and with varying performance and availability, making it increasingly challenging for local and national decision makers to decide which tests to purchase and use. This was a key gap, as ensuring that high-quality tests are available and accessible to LMICs is vitally important in supporting a robust and equitable response to the pandemic.

Source: Neha Agarwal, ‘Making sense of COVID-19 diagnostics’, PATH, 23 November 2020, https://www.path.org/articles/making-sense-covid-19-diagnostics.

Recognizing this, several inter-agency collaborations and initiatives were established to support LMICs in gaining access to affordable and quality tools for the COVID-19 response, including the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, the Diagnostic Consortium for COVID-19 (involving the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Stop TB Partnership’s Global Drug Facility, the Pan American Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Children’s Fund, Unitaid/Clinton Health Access Initiative and the World Health Organization (WHO)), WHO’s development of product selection considerations for COVID-19 diagnostics and more. While these efforts continue to make important progress, the need for greater transparency and access to information at regional and local levels is equally important to ensure equitable outcomes.

In response to this gap and need, the PATH Diagnostics Program developed a set of six interactive COVID-19 diagnostic dashboards. Each of the dashboards aggregates and visualizes publicly available information on available COVID-19 diagnostic tests, addressing specific needs of national governments, procurers, funders and policymakers, and helping them to navigate the complex and congested marketplace to better support their COVID-19 responses.

Given the inherent challenges for procurement officials in LMICs to secure quality-assured COVID-19 diagnostics in a timely manner, in 2021 the Access and Delivery Partnership (ADP) partner PATH developed the COVID-19 Diagnostics Procurement Resource, a tool specifically designed to support country-level procurement decisions. The interactive dashboard consolidates key data and parameters needed to make informed decisions about the technical specifications, performance, regulatory status and supply of individual COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

The interactive dashboard provides users with access to aggregated public data on an increasing number of COVID-19 diagnostic tests. The data can be easily filtered by country-specific regulatory status and with key test specifications to identify products that meet highly specific procurement needs and requirements.

The dashboard seeks to provide information that is most useful for in-country diagnostics procurement officials and includes, where available, indicative purchase pricing of tests and distributor information.

Going forward, the resource is continually updated to incorporate further relevant products and associated data. Further efforts to promote the resource and collect feedback from key stakeholders are also planned to support continuous improvement.

Further information:

ADP, ‘COVID-19 Diagnostics Procurement Resource’

PATH, ‘COVID-19 Diagnostics Dashboards’

This is part of a collection of impact stories highlighting the work of the Access and Delivery Partnership in ensuring access to health technologies for those in need. For more information and to read additional impact stories, please visit the ADP website.

© 2026 Access and Delivery Partnership

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