Day 1: Monday, November 14th
Time | Session | Facilitator(s) |
0830 -0930 | Introductions and Goals/Expectations | Jake Watson |
0930 – 1030 | HIS Architecture Review & Discussion Review several predominant national HIS architectures | Brian Taliesin |
1030 -1050 | Coffee Break |
|
1100 -1230 | Trip Findings: High-Level Review of the Prior Week’s Visits | Kevin Cussen/Mary Jo Kochendorfer (TZ) Christine Lenihan (ZM) |
1230 -1330 | Lunch |
|
1330 – 1500 | eLMIS/OpenLMIS Feature Showcase: - Facility Edition (Zambia)
- ESMS Mobile App (Mozambique)
| Chris Opit (JSI) & Tim Bollinger (CHAI), Danni Yu (Thoughtworks) |
1500 -1515 | Coffee Break |
|
1515 – 1630 | Reporting Overview: | Alpha Nsaghurwe Chris Opit |
1630 – 1700 | Wrap Up & Preview of Day 2 Objectives | Jake Watson |
* Happy Hour (same venue)
Introductions and Goals/Expectations
Jake Watson (Deactivated) made introductions and performed a review of the goals of the conference.
HIS Architecture Review & Discussion
Brian led an interactive post-it note session where he described different software domains as well as different countries. Indicated that there is a shift in thinking of software as part of an ecosystem rather than as a standalone service. Interoperability should be thought of in terms of trends (what is coming rather than what is here now) and that interoperability should be part of the discussion earlier on in a project.
One example is that a facility registry is often offered as an online service now rather than a list administered centrally.
Trip Findings: High-Level Review of the Prior Week’s Visits
Kevin Cussen (Deactivated) &
Christine Lenihan presented a deck describing the outcome of 4 days of exploration in Tanzania and Zambia (see
Gap Analysis: eLMIS Tanzania & Zambia and OpenLMIS 3.x). In Tanzania they interviewed 4 of the 6 roles. Based on these interviews the gap appears to be fairly small and limited to reporting related functionality. However, in Zambia many gaps in functionality were found with high levels of complexity. One additional week in Tanzania will likely be enough to complete discovery, while 2 - 3 additional weeks in Zambia will likely be required to document feature gaps.
Some in attendance took the opportunity to question the wisdom of building a new platform without an end user, instead suggesting that USAID and BMGF should invest in upgrading eLMIS. Wendy B suggested that there should be a MoU between VR and JSI and it was stated that there is a lot of mistrust between the two organizations. USAID stated that new implementations of OpenLMIS are a higher priority than an upgrade for either Tanzania or Zambia, and that there was an expectation that the community work together.
USAID isn't against a CRDM process, but wants as much of their money to go towards development of new features as possible - as such they will not be funding a renewed CRDM. Kyle Duarte pointed out the inherent risk of coordinating the development of OpenLMIS and the continued development of eLMIS. Emphasized the need to not only find the gap once, but to have a mechanism to know how that gap is changing over time. USAID asked that the gap analysis proposal be re-written to remove costing estimations and business cases and instead to focus on finding the gap now and on an on-going basis.
Representatives from JSI Zambia specifically had some concerns about:
- Backward compatibility - want new features, but also want to keep their old features (this is especially concerning around integration with EMR)
- Timeline & expectations - Zambia says they can't slow down or stop their development to sync up with OpenLMIS development
- Collaborations - how will the two teams collaborate (wants an MoU)
Kevin Cussen (Deactivated) suggested we need access to the Facility Edition code base and documentation in order to get a good estimation of the gap over time. Marasi replied that documentation is in several places from the ThoughtWorks era and may be hard to track down but that the code is owned by JSI.
Jake Watson (Deactivated) pointed out these types of activities are primary reasons for the gap analysis mechanism.
Open Questions
- How do we maintain insight into this on-going gap?
- Watch github?
- Shared roadmap sessions
- Are JSI devs involved in building OpenLMIS? (asked by Wendy B)
- VillageReach has offered to pay for time from Elias to work on the OpenLMIS re-architecture
eLMIS/OpenLMIS Feature Showcase
Chris Opit and Wendy Bommett gave a demonstration of the features of eLMIS Facility Edition. Tim Bollinger from CHAI Mozambique and Danni Yu of ThoughtWorks gave a presentation on the ESMS application in use in Mozambique. ESMS is a mobile front-end for Android tablets that uses the stock management back-end functionality developed in version 2 of OpenLMIS. They discussed the approved scale up of ESMS in Mozambique to 100 facilities in 2017 and the handover of ownership from CHAI Moz to PSM who will support the app moving forward.
Reporting Overview
Alpha led the discussion.
- Reports are interactive and users can drill down and take action. For example, within reporting rate, a user can click and see a list of facilities. Once there, a user can send an email directly from there.
- Geo-spatial dashboard
- Canned administrative reports
Use MetaBase for ad hoc reporting and to ensure appropriate configuration of the system (diagnostics).