Access 2-page flyer for summarised insights
Improving vaccine uptake is one of the most pressing challenges facing both pharmaceutical organisations and public-health systems today. Despite significant investment in awareness campaigns, education programmes and policy initiatives, vaccination coverage often varies dramatically between regions, populations and healthcare systems.
A recent executive webinar hosted by OpenSky and the Global Health Connector, brought together leaders from pharma, public health and digital health to explore a critical question:
Why do some vaccination programmes succeed while others struggle — even within the same country?
The webinar session in January examined how data intelligence, behavioural insight and modern AI tools can help identify the real drivers of vaccine uptake and translate them into measurable outcomes.
Many vaccination programmes still rely heavily on national coverage averages and annual reporting cycles. While these metrics provide an important high-level picture, they rarely explain the underlying reasons why uptake varies across regions or populations.
During the session, speakers emphasised that improving vaccination coverage requires more than simply measuring rates. It requires understanding the behavioural, systemic and access-related factors that influence whether individuals ultimately receive a vaccine.
Without this deeper insight, interventions risk being broad, expensive and inefficient.
One of the highlights of the webinar was the case study of the HPV vaccination programme in Slovakia, presented by MSD.
The programme demonstrated how targeted interventions informed by data insights can significantly improve vaccine coverage. By analysing uptake patterns and identifying barriers at a more granular level, stakeholders were able to adjust engagement strategies and focus resources where they would have the greatest impact.
The results were substantial, with vaccination coverage increasing significantly year-on-year.
This example illustrates a key point: data alone does not drive change — but data combined with strategic action can.
Understanding the Drivers Behind Uptake
The discussion also explored how vaccine uptake is influenced by a complex combination of factors, including:
These factors often vary widely across districts or regions within the same country. As a result, national-level reporting can obscure important local patterns that influence vaccination outcomes.
To address this, organisations increasingly need granular insight that connects behavioural drivers, health system variables and vaccination data.
A key theme of the session was the transition from traditional reporting models to intelligence-driven decision making.
Instead of relying solely on aggregated metrics, modern analytical approaches integrate multiple data sources — including vaccination coverage data, socio-economic indicators, healthcare system signals and behavioural proxies — to identify patterns and correlations that influence uptake.
Advanced analytics and machine learning can then help uncover which variables most strongly affect vaccination behaviour and where targeted interventions are most likely to succeed.
This approach allows organisations to move from simply observing coverage trends to actively shaping them.
For pharmaceutical market access teams, the implications are significant.
In many markets, vaccine programmes and other public health interventions are under increasing scrutiny to demonstrate measurable value. Decision-makers are looking for evidence that investments are producing tangible outcomes.
Data-driven insight can help market access teams:
In short, the ability to connect data insight with programme outcomes is becoming an increasingly important capability.
Created by OpenSky, this briefing provides a concise overview of the themes discussed during the event and highlights why data intelligence is becoming central to improving vaccine uptake across both pharmaceutical and public-health programmes.