OpenLMIS & PATH COVID-19 Coordination

Owned by Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jun 05, 2020
4 min read

Date: June 5th

Objective: PATH has contract to manage oxygen supplies for COVID response and are considering using OpenLMIS COVID tool as a way to manage the inventory/track equiptment. Goal for today’s call is to learn about eachother’s tools; discuss whether it makes sense to join forces and link our efforts

Call participants:

  • OpenLMIS: @Gaurav Bhattacharya (Unlicensed) @Wesley Brown @Brandon Bowersox-Johnson @Christine Lenihan @Satish Choudhury @Brian Taliesin @Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed)

  • PATH: Alex Rothkopf (consultant to PATH’s market dynamics team for COVID19 response, interested in inventory mgmt and asset mgmt and maintenance of equipment that is coming into countries. Hannah Eddy (oxygen delivery toolkit and asset mgmt), Lauren Janes (in business school joining PATH for the summer), Zachary Clemence (Lead country engagement on COVID-19 respitoary work, PATH, working with CHAI in 7 countries), Doug Morris (Senior Data Manager), Lisa Smith (Senior Program Officer at PATH running the COVID-19 grant from Gates Foundation), Julie Rajaratnam

Notes:

The need on the PATH side:

  • (Alex): this is exploratory; getting into question of inventory mgmt; seeing this as an opportunity to learn about OpenLMIS. They played around with the resources online…

  • How the implementation works? requires some infrastructure investment for OpenLMIS; hosting and start investment is taken by OpenLMIS then the countries need to finance afterwards.

    • Want to learn more about the financing side; Has this been deployed or not? how are countries approaching this?

      • Wes: they already had things in place. The system will run on any desktop from the last 5 years, the hardware requirements are basic. Gaurav: Zim and Cameroon have these devices in facilities already. We are asking countries to pay for hosting and in country trainings where we will do master training

      • Wes: We have added the ability to do basic tracking, but we are not an asset mgmt system. Our level of equipment mgmt might be good enough. This module in OpenLMIS came out of the vaccine logistics and COVID presented opportunity to expand on this for ventilators

      • Gaurav/Satish: We would be document the type of equipment and its capacity, make, model, and other key specifications. Yes its a re-purposed dataset from the vaccines workflow. Can capture location, make, and just the basics so they can apply to a wide range of assets (including ICU beds, ventilators, etc.). Cannot be adjusted to specific equipment categories currently. you can define an asset type, then make and model, then possibly add serial number and location. Additional text fields to provide context.

      • Alex: they aren't sure what their needs are, they are starting to explore. Doug: could facilities themselves have a basic binary data capture (is it working or not?). Yes definitely possible.

      • Implementation status: Currently training in Zimbabwe and Cameroon; they are production ready. Going to be live very soon- plan seems to be to roll out nationally in both. Start with a top down approach in central and regional warehouses, and then to COVID response facilities (not all facilities will be included in this). They are struggling to put together the basic info (make and model) or equipment so will initial

      • How does the matchmaking process work? Gaurav: CHAI presented to their country program teams and MoH. The time from initiating first contact until starting implementation is roughly …Discussions with ministries of health happened in April and now in June we are looking to hold trainings next week

        • How does the pitch process go? Its been iterative: started with a 2 pager outlining the tool and benefits, then move to detailed discussion/demo, then started collecting info on business process flows and data. The final hoop is to take the data, create a country-specific instance and demo it to the country to visualize how it can work for them. Country and global teams have been able to re-allocate their time to dedicate to COVID. Re: costs there is data collection, software development/configuration, training material development, and deployment planning.

      • How much benefit is there for countries that already have OpenLMIS? There would still be some training required still. For Malawi, they are not spinning up a new instance for the COVID specific commodities; they have opted to add a new program to their existing instance to streamline the approval and reporting

      • Is there a list of all the versions of OpenLMIS, and whether they would support the COVID tool? All of the older versions are distinct applications. If they want to use this COVID system with CHAI they would be running the most recent 3.x version

        • Gaurav: other countries have different eLMIS, and some countries have nothing. Country-by country assessment to see if their system is flexible and extensible enough to add a tool to; and if its feasible under the current restrictions. If its not, then it might be a fit for them to add the COVID tool to it. If after they use it and don't want to use it, they can de-commission it.

        • Costs: hosting: a couple of hundred euros, and in country training costs, as well as human resource costs (team in place to do system admin, take user queries) and supportive supervision to help users continue to use it

  • Brian: What countries might be part of this scope? Alex: DRC, Zambia, Malawi, Senegal, TZ, Kenya, Vietnam, India, Myanmar. CHAI is overseeing Guinea, parts of India, sharing with Kenya and TZ, west African countries (cant' remember), Ethiopia

  • Timing: Their gates grant is 18 months investment until end of next year.

  • distinction between tracking status; and maintenance management (which is very complex).

Next steps

Alex: think about it more and figure out which route they want to go. Try to see which countries already have solutions in place and see if they can use those. More discussions internally over the coming weeks. they are learning now what countries are doing

would be interested to see business case estimates for Zim and Cameroon to get a feeling for how they were budgeted. @Gaurav Bhattacharya (Unlicensed) can look into this…

 

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