Intro Meeting with Signalytic

Date: Monday Jan 13, 2020

OpenLMIS participants: Wesley Brown, Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed), Brian Taliesin, Dércio Duvane, Josh Zamor, 

Signalytic :Nico (CEO of Signalytic), Willem (CTO) works on the technical side, medical device background, PhD, Bryan Plummer (he and Nico are old friends) has worked in international devt/poverty alleviation; moving this forward as a social enterprise

Background:  experience in Uganda saw that lots of lifesaving medicines were not there; supply chains were not working; data not being exchanged well; did a research study in east Uganda and spoke to the people working in the system; found hardware intrastructure that wasnt there (UI, lack of power supply). These are the problems that they work with to fill the niche and complement efforts of other organizations; focus on healthcare workers in rural areas

Their solution:

-criteria would be that it would have to replace paper (thus have uptime of 100%); generally work with places with limited cell network; it has to be a low cost and easy to maintain system

-embedded platform

-every health center gets a mini-server with its own wifi connection

-they create a storage and forward set-up; communicate in batches

-using some ideas from blockchain; use hash values to create a history of the data and make an auditable trail of the data

-can see other inventory data; and request more from other health centers; have different modules for different functions

-Their interest: want to know if they could make their system a conduit for OpenLMIS implementations; the easiest way would be able to create a data bridge to make the data available to an OpenLMIS server

They initially thought they could create a proxy server for an OpenLMIS server

How is data exchanged? We have APIs

(Wes) we dont have a use case yet for a mostly or fully offline system

SIGLUS android app based on OpenLMIS v2 which is installed on 

We have a robust API to use for communications internally

Interest in being part of a country project who is interested in extending OpenLMIS to the perifery (like maybe Moz/Ang); PSM is going to conduct an assessment to determine what the country's needs 

Williem: thinks there is a  lack of communication in rural Uganda and think that is not going to improve anytime soon. Storing data locally becomes imperative; how do you maintain communication within the health center–need a local communication hub. 

They are interested in working with OpenLMIS; interoperability (??) (Not sure what they are proposing??) test something in the periphery . They have been very focused in Uganda and they have their own way of implementing a digital system; Rebecca could maybe help identify places; have had talkes with other places in East Africa; want to be more involved 

What is a tangible product /who is a set of clients that could use OpenLMIS if it had the features that you are taking about? Narrow the scope so that we can focus our efforts on something very tangible

Wes- there is a similar product to yours which is called 'BRCK'

Next steps:

Wes - If there is a specific use-case or potential project we could work on together it could help us solidify what an integration would do and how it could work. Having a real project could be a means to get some funding to support this work. My impression was that the Signalytic group was going to look for possible options but there was not something specific right now.