April 16, 2019

Carl Leitner

Welcome to Empower School of Health to the OpenLMIS Community! 

Their primary points of contact for their involvement with OpenLMIS are: 

Professor Paul Lalvani, Director Empower School of Health (Governance committee representative)

Sachin Jagtap  (Governance/Product committee)

Siddharth Srivastava (Produce Committee)

https://digitalhealthatlas.org/en/-/   There is a map that stakeholders can scan to see what digital health technologies are being used in each country.   The current projects in OpenLMIS are here.

Linkages to the Global Good Guide Book (Carl Leitner to describe). Guidebook intended for mission offices and other global organizations. It will link back to the Digital Health Atlas

Consensus needed on who the contact/focal person for each implementation should be. 

How is it being used? Donors want to know a foot print of a solution (how scaled is it).  Additionally if anyone wants to learn more about the solution, they will want a contact which can provide that information.

→consensus: move from US based listing (current) each individual country implementations

Option 1) Each implementing organization is listed as the contact. If we have each implementing organization serve as the point person, we want a way to say they are all OpenLMIS.

Option 2) We list info@openlmis.org as the contact, so inquiries come to the Community Manager. If we have info@openlmis.org be the point for each implementation, we will need a way to keep it updated (right now we don’t know all the information about the scale of the solution in each country.

Question from Kaleb: How are other global goods doing this? Carl: OpenMRS is not a great comparison because they do more facility deployments. Not sure about what DHIS2 is doing. IRIS would be in the same boat in terms of deployment style.

Kaleb: It mgiht make sense to keep this centralized at first, to see across. But could evolve over time. Not a strong viewpoint

Dan Cocos from BAO: 

Edward: it might be great to have the sponsoring organization as key point of contact, implementing organizations come and go. This could help promote ownership of organizations to get them more engaged. Preference for first option. 

Carl- we could go back to the digital health atlas to ask if we can list more than one contact- to address some of these concerns. We have the ministry owner, lead implementing organization, as well as the general tool point of contact

Brandon: it would be great to be able to list all of these contacts (all 3)

Carl- propose to call a vote with - in the short term list info@openLMIS, break up US project, and go back to Digital Health Atlas product owner to request additional contact spaces to be added to add in the implementing partner and govt contacts. At least then we have a pathway to get the data more accurate and get local ownership updated

Informal vote- no nays or abstentions. Vote agreed- motion has passed

Next Steps: Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed) to update the Digital Health Atlas with info@ as principle contact for all country entries. Carl Leitner or other person TBD will connect with the Digital Health Atlas folks to see if we can add contact spaces for additional entries

Reflections or additional information re: Zimbabwe RFP: SolDevelp, VR, and CHAI were not selected.

• What can we learn from this? Who was selected? Bylita (sp?)- tool is Entution. This company is working in Nepal. They came to DC to JSI to introduce their tool. Its an ERP platform that they have extended. They seem capable and eager
• It has been successful in Nepal- they seem to have focused in the Asia context

What can we do as a community to make these RFP submissions easier, especially given the quick turnaround time? Tools? Ex: sample implementation plan, budget templates. * This potentially would be only for Trusted Partners to use*

?Is there a way to do a debrief of the funding agency to learn what the weaknesses are?

?Look at some past RFPs- to help inform what types of templates woudl be helpful? Maybe something around the value of an Open source global good and why that is an advantage. Our value proposition. Articulating the qualitative and quantitative value of the community. Some type of language that connects the donor investment principles. Note: although this might not be part of the evaluation criteria

 -There is not currently canned language related to OpenLMIS re: principles for digital development and donor investment principles

-we have a good body of responses over the past 2 plus years to draw from

-Is there interest from the community in pulling together this type of information? or is this information too proprietary? 

-Dan: something that says the software has been 'audited' or scanned by security tools. TPs can used this when partners are asked about data security. This would not give away people's trade secret. Edward agrees

-Brandon- this could be something helpful but not a highest priority. If there are people from the Zimbabwe committee we could talk to to get feedback from our bid. 

Conclusion and next steps: sounds like there is maybe some interest for different resources but also a desire to keep certain information close at hand. If you have something that you use internally that you would be willing to share- share that list of tools or templates/common language to Rebecca or Carl. We will see if we receive enough artifacts from partners to share then we will develop a toolkit

presentation of revised draft concept note for OpenLMIS Study Tours to governance for feedback

Document is open to governance committee members to leave comments until April 26th, after which point I will incorporate comments and finalize process

Process Overview: 

Review Criteria Summary:

Trusted Partner Hosts

• Current level of engagement and contributions to OpenLMIS community
• Demonstrated technical knowledge of OpenLMIS system
• Demonstrated understanding of the OpenLMIS implementation process, challenges, and recommended best practices
• Existing relationship with relevant digital health decision makers/stakeholders in country
• Ability to support an implementation for the Interested Party
• The extent to which the pair of two Trusted Partners complement each other’s knowledge (Why will they work well together? Will one learn from the other? What is the value added for having both?)
• Other?

‘Interested Party’ in Applying Country

• Demonstration of interest in OpenLMIS as a national solution, or upgrading an existing OpenLMIS implementation to an expanded feature set. They should be able to describe that there is buy-in for this idea
• Articulation of the funding source(s) for a potential OpenLMIS implementation, and if possible, rough estimate of funds available
• Understanding of OpenLMIS v3 features
• Willingness to use some of own funds for the visit
• Clear articulation of Study Tour objectives and intended outcomes
• Other?

Next steps: Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed) to collect feedback from committee until April 26 and will incorporate it unto the concept note. Then we launch the study tours and encourage Trusted Partners to be in touch about potential opportunities that they see

Update from Resonance Team - by James and Kim

1. Timeline Update
   

   May 7th meeting- to be rescheduled

   June 4 will be a Sustainability GC Meeting (off-cycle / special meeting)

   June 25-26 will be a Workshop in person in Washington DC

2. Key Dates
   
   Also a series of Webinars May 20-June 7 around these themes: Product, Governance and Customer

Discuss options for deeper engagement with governance committee

Slides presented by Resonance: 

(Did not get time to cover this)

Conferences

• DHIS2 Symposium
  • April 10-11, Washington DC
  • Carl Leitner and possibly other community members to represent OpenLMIS

• ICT4D

  • April 30 – May 3 2019 in Kampala, Uganda
  • Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed) and Wesley Brown to attend- will have an exhibitors booth
  • Maguette Thioro Ndong from Digital Square is presenting: Adapting Global Standards to improve Supply Chain in Health domain
• Health & Humanitarian Logistics Conference 
  • July 10-11, 2019 in Kigali, Rwanda

(Did not get time to cover this)

Country implementation opportunities: