Strategies for a Sustainable OpenLMIS Community (GOV)

Description: What resourcing options are available to sustainably support the OpenLMIS community and implementations? What funding or revenue options should the community pursue?

Leads: Mattias, Lindabeth

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PIN: 63498

Rapporteur/Notetaker:Sandy Hawley

Notes from Session:(SEE Tanzania handout from LB and Dykki's slides)

Sustainability Questions with Current Implementation

• Being that the dev. is in JAVA- it's not a good talent pool for required skillset

• How can we provide country resources to build capacity or at least maintain at a regional level?

  • what do we expect countries to maintain themselves

  • maybe Tier 2

  • do we expect T3 to step up/step in ? 
    
    
    

• TZ/ZM provided stats - what happens after VIMS; what are their maintenance models?

  • some data from email  

  • not everything is transferrable

  • in Pakistan- all support is in country, provided by JSI in country staff

• Where is the cut off- where do we need to focus our resources to work with countries on transition plans? 

• VR- MOZ (500 facilities, 20 users, collecting at each facility- TZ has 5K users)

Tiered Support

• T1- can't log in, can't go to next screen

• T2- advanced support did everything right, but not getting right answer

• T3-  more of a bug; possible code corrections, could include features if we had maintenance fund--

What to do now, key issues

• The expectation was that this has gone longer than anticipated - budget is an issue - we don't want it to fail, but what can we do with drastically shrinking budget?

  • $16MM to 4MM in Zambia - HIV TA $500K only

  • oenus lies with country; conceptually they understand, but they are not in a position to pay/sustain

  • if they want support they have to pay for it

• First generation deployments- don't we have the responsibility to take on T3 support , but we are not taking on T1 or T2

• Community is in favor of upgrade path, they join the path as new implementations, but this will depend on whether the upgrade path and what they want (timing wise) are happening at the same time.

• It shouldn't be, (was the project scoped with maintenance plan?) frame the products as much as you can, start using local resources

• DHIS2 is defacto for a reason, they were originally a university program set up to build capacity, grad students capacity first, THEN system- ownership was integral

• ramp up takes time

Regional makes sense- See also Dykki's Slides

• Breaks dependency of someone inside TZ; single group could cover multiple countries

• If there aren't many T3 issues, partner or local dev firm could absorb, Kenya, Ethiopia - contract for support of these entities, customization, system admin

• Software, config, domain expertise - ARC doesn't exist yet-- but there has to be others who are doing this so we don't have to: GEMBY eHealth 

• Cases: iHRIS

  • East. Central and Southern Africa Health Community- regional associations for MOH

  • West Africa health Organizations

  • paid by countries (partner/donor $)

  • Leader of Stakeholder Leadership Group - went to present to these groups at conference

    • peer to peer is powerful

    • more countries came on board, ECAH became part of team, all major E. African teams became bilateral - with USAID support along the way

  • Dissemination pilot to 13 regional leaders, sharing results  

  • Video: A West African Perspective on Open Source (YouTUBE)

    • great insights on value of os - against proprietary products where vendor controls price

  • Country rolled out system w/o partners - asked countries to go to donors and ask for community to support implementations

  • Product hasn't matured enough to deliver on the "download" promise - OpenLMIS  needs to go through that process

  • East Africa has a resource; that is why ARC is focusing on West

    • as it forms, OpenLMIS should partner, be involved closely

  • Nothing is more powerful than country engagement

  • Academic partners are key, especially in TZ - UCC, UD; foundation knowledge is there

    • MCSP is embarking on eHealth architecture activities

    • A lot of local capacity

    • partners need to work out who runs it (some competitive nature there)

  • World Bank, EU, DIFID - local teams have pulse on funding opportunities  

  • Is having countries run this the long term goal? If it is, have to take steps to get there from the beginning

  • Saas- a potential model, implied support contract that is part of the service cost; if the math works out, its sufficient

    • we might need to broaden our target , 3PLs involved, has to be more than MOH customers

    • how would impact last mile environments  would the negatively effect product

    • humanitarian space - Word Vision, Mercy Core- is anything different?

    • DHIS2- adopted by countries for M&E

  • Does  iHRIS still have support for core product? - at the time

    • country implementation

    • core product community

    • what do we need to do to stay relevant

    • some fail, some success- need foundation model

    • Global Goods, Apache, if something could come to exist in this vein that could aggregate funders around common investment

Opportunities

Session recording became too big to upload, please contact kevin.cussen@villagereach.org for a copy.