Meeting with Empower School of Health

Owned by Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Nov 13, 2018
3 min read

Website: https://www.empowerschoolofhealth.org/

Date: TBD



Initial Thoughts Re: potential Collaboration

  • It sounds we as an initiative are curious about how to expand into humanitarian logistics (to respond do disasters, food insecurity, etc.); and this is a core expertise of Empower
  • I know they conduct SCM assessments, and offer lots of SCM courses globally—so if we eventually got OpenLMIS higher on their radar so that it could be integrated into course material/assessment reports as an example of an evidence-based intervention/global tool for public health SCM, that could go a long way in promoting OpenLMIS…
  • Question: Where does OpenLMIS fit into their portfolio?-- is it their Global Health Leadership Program? Or in the multi- country coordination work they do for Supply Chain Management? Other (possibly some of their centers of excellence?
    • should we invite them to participate in committee meetings? 

Meeting Notes

Introductions: Radhika Sing- consultant procurement supply chain; Sachin- looks after the consulting assignments; 3 verticals 1) consulting 2- education (learning and development)  3) classroom trainings- open workshops and bespoke workshops for clients

What they are working on at Empower- manage a couple of project; capacity building for procurement and supply chain; they have a couple solutions in terms of tools (capacity assessment tool); learning & development on platforms; combining learnings from various institutes into one platform

For LMIS & tech solutions they are engaged in a number of projects in the past few years; worked on inventory management system in Zambia (interacted with JSI); looked into interoperability of systems

Last year did LMIS landscape study in Zimbabwe- recommended 3 LMIS systems, OpenLMIS was one of them. 

Did a project on reporting on LMIS  using dashboards


MJ: There has been a lot of new development work on the software; so the architecture has changed in the past few years- new only stock management module (which ties to the requisition module); we do cold chain which is inter operable with RTM; so we are stronger in immunization management now; we are now releasing a data reporting stack which has a microservice architecture

MJ: we are interested in exploring whether OpenLMIS can support humanitarian relief work- this is a potential area of collaboration

MJ: Is an of the landscaping work published? We can provide info/input/updates to contribute to future work in this area

Interest in providing support in landscape studies; and potentially focus more on relief-related work

Sachin: they work more exclusively in public health supply chains; they have a good understanding of humanitarian logistics but its not their main focus

  • they are interested to learn more about our product. They are neutral/unbiased consultants; they do functional consulting and varies lots based on the country
  • they advise re: customization, integration
  • they are close to customers in terms of solving their supply chain issues- have a practical understanding of issues, trainings needed, etc. They have rich expertise in this area. 

MJ: What do you envision for opportunities for collaboration & support:

  • if in the future you do a landscape study, we can provide updates on feature-sets because we are actively releasing new features every quarter
  • explained our community partners...and how we support ministries
  • Are you involved in OpenHIE? Its a body that is working to build standards for digital health tools; setting info standards → they want to be part of this
  • We have a toolkit where we talk about lessons learned, how to support a ministry in collecting requirements; training approaches; --it is all online and available as an open source community. 
  • Are you interested in becoming a Trusted Partner? You can do this and support other tools as well. → they seem interested in exploring this as well

Sachin: Re: product development–they could also contribute to the development of new features. They do a lot of implementation so can bring to table that past experience. This would be contributing as a Trusted Partner, and then if in the product strategy and we wanted to fund a more involved project that would be possible too. They are happy to share ideas and experiences with the community pro-bono

→Rebecca to share Trusted partner info; how to join; how we share info/become part of the community; as well as how to join OpenHIE community; share some info over emails; 

→ def interested in collaborating




OpenLMIS: the global initiative for powerful LMIS software