Date/Location: Manila, Philippines, August 19 and 20th , Philippines International Expo and Suppliers Conference 

Attendees: Ashraf & Wendy Bomett (JSI)

Background: 

The Department of Health (DOH) of the Philippines, with support from its technical partners, is strengthening the procurement and supply chain management (PSCM) system for health commodities. One of the key objectives of DOH for PSCM strengthening is to deploy a state-of-the-art electronic logistic management information system (eLMIS) throughout the country to manage procurement and supply information, commodity flow, warehousing, dispensing, consumption and stock reporting, and data aggregation. The eLMIS is expected to be interoperable with other information systems, including health facility-level enterprise resource planning, electronic medical records, and track and trace bar codes.

Ashraf Islam and Wendy Bomett from JSI represented the OpenLMIS community at the expo and showcased the OpenLMIS V3 and provided a country perspective on implementation.

Full Trip Report is available here for more details.   Below is a summary of information

Department of Health (DOH) Requirements:

An information system that can enable the vision of universal health care (UHC) in Philippines. Requirements were in following area:

• Inventory Management
• Warehouse Management
• Transportation
• Need Assessment, Product Selection, Forecasting, quantification, Procurement plan
• Reporting/Dashboard
• KPI presented with GIS, with drill down
• Requisitions
• Order Fulfilment
• Dispensing
• Inter-operability
• GS1 bar coding
• Procurement (possibly)

Time horizon:

• Philippines would like to have universal healthcare by 2025 (in 6 years). They would like to do this in phases. They recognize the need to have digital health embedded in this road map
• After the Expo, realizes that this eLMIS implementation process will take more than one year
• Realizes that a country wide implementation of a system that will provide end-to-end visibility will require 5-10 years.

Product groups:

• Pharmaceutical
• Medical Supplies
• Lab Supplies
• Medical Equipment
• Vaccines
• Reagents

Program priority areas:

• Family Planning
• TB
• Malaria
• Essential Health

Hardware/Networking/Hosting:

• Cloud hosting initially
• During production stage, DoH hosting likely
• Doesn’t have any bias against cloud hosting or hosting on foreign cloud providers as long as they can maintain full control on data ownership
• Data ownership and security will require compliance to DoH regulations

MTAPS role

• Hosting the Expo
• Assisting DOH in finalizing the TOR/RFP
• Organizing and cleaning up the master data at warehouse level in preparation of the warehouse management system

Full Trip Report: The below trip report contains detailed notes, details of relevant contacts and conversations, as well as photos on specific sessions attended