The reviewed evidence suggests that task-shifting from doctors to nurses, or from health care professionals to lay health workers can potentially reduce costs of ART provision without compromising health outcomes for patients. Task-shifting is therefore a potentially effective and cost-effective approach to addressing the human resource limitations to ART rollout. However, most of the studies conducted were relatively small and more evidence is needed for each task-shifting model as it is currently limited.

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Evidence on the effectiveness and cost implications of mobile clinic and home-based ART is currently limited. Although the few available studies suggest home-based ART can potentially be as effective as health facility-based ART, there is need for more research before robust conclusions can be made. Results from the few available studies also suggest that health facility-based ART is the most cost-effective.

The aim of this review was to analyze the impact of interventions designed to standardize collection and reporting of logistics data for managing essential medicines in developing countries. Literature was identified from searches of Medline, EMBASE and Web of Science until March 2011. Other relevant publications were identified from websites of organizations working in the study area and contacts working in the field. The search identified a total of 358 articles out of which 11 were selected for inclusion. All articles were before and after analysis without control areas. Standardizing the collection and reporting of logistics data through automation (full or partial) and manual tools resulted in improvements on the availability of quality logistics data for supply chain decision-making, and continual availability of essential medicines. Use of mobile technologies resulted in low error rates in forecasting and demand planning, and significantly reduced decision lead time. The findings from this review suggest that standardization of collection and reporting of logistics data to support decision-making on essential medicine supply can lead to improvements on availability and quality of logistics data and availability of essential medicines. However there is need for more robust experimental and quasi-experimental studies on the topic.