Consultant – Global HIV Drug Resistance (HIVDR) Database at World Health Organization

Purpose of consultancy

To contribute to the Treatment, Care and Service Delivery unit (TAC) work to provide expert advice and manage the HIVDR database: to provide primary and secondary-level guidance, to advice country users in the use of the database and to provide technical input for and testing of planned, new database functionalities and, to develop an automated tool to analyse annual proficiency panels.

Deliverables: 

Task 1: Provide primary- and secondary-level technical expertise to country and regional users of the WHO HIV drug resistance database. This includes expert advice and management of country user log in requests as well as request made by WHO country, regional or HQ, remote tutorials to country users on use of database, expert advice to country or WHO country, regional or HQ users in data cleaning and upload of data to the WHO HIVDR database. 

• Deliverable 1.1: Primary- and secondary-level guidance provided to users of the WHO HIVDR database. This technical expertise includes management of log in requests, remote tutorials to country users on use of database for up to 15 countries, and data cleaning and upload for data from up to 15 countries. 
  Timeline: (20 days during 11 months)

Task 2: Provide expert advice to WHO in developing the content for and executing up to 6 regional webinars on the HIVDR database. Webinars for survey types: pre-treatment HIV drug resistance, acquired HIVDR (ADR) (viral load lab-based, clinic-based and sentinel methods), drug resistance in people newly diagnosed with HIV. In collaboration with the HIVDR team, up to 2 webinars to be planned and executed by the Service Provider, per quarter.

• Deliverable 2.1: 1-2 webinars developed and executed per quarter (up to 6 total).
  Timeline: (5 days during 11 months)

Task 3: Provide technical advice to the HIVDR team and external developer in development of new modules of the WHO HIVDR database. There will be up to four new modules developed in 2023: lab-based ADR; enhanced lab-based ADR; clinic-based ADR; and sentinel ADR. In addition, there will be development of a BCCFE API for concatenation of HIV-1 RT, PR, IN sequences and development of a sandbox for sequence quality assurance of sequences by WHO HIVResNet laboratory users.
To provide technical advice to the HIVDR team and developers through attendance at weekly or bi-weekly standing meetings with HIVDR team and developer and by providing technical inputs via emails.

• Deliverable 3.1: Quarterly short reports detailing technical inputs provided to HIVDR team and development at weekly or bi-weekly calls as well as records of inputs provided by email.
  Timeline: (10 days during 11 months)

Task 4: Evaluate new modules (developed by external developers and delineated under Task 3).  To develop test datasets for each of the relevant modules defined in Task 3, perform testing, provide feedback to HIVDR team and external developer – reporting if new modules meet business rules and are free of technical “bugs.”

• Deliverable 4.1: Quarterly short reports detailing results of testing and feedback provided to database developers and the HIVDR team. 
  Timeline: (15 days during 11 months)

Task 5: Develop an automated tool to score proficiency panel results generated by HIVResNet laboratories against a known standard.

• Deliverable 5.1: Automated scoring tool for HIVResNet laboratory proficiency panels developed.
  Timeline: (10 days during month 9)

Qualifications, experience, skills and languages.

Educational Qualifications:

Essential:

• First university degree in information and web technology, or equivalent discipline.

Experience

Essential:

• At least 7 years of experience in data management and database development, out of which at least 5 years’ international experience.

Skills/knowledge

Essential:

• Knowledge of ETL, SQL, data visualization, QA testing, conducting web training and writing users manuals. 
• SQL Server, PowerBI, ETL tools, Python, R.
• Good communication and presentation skills.