Availability of medication, vaccines, and medical supplies for your population is only part of the solution — for effective health outcomes, you need a logistics plan for delivering your supplies to the right place in the requested quantities and on time. Supply chain inefficiencies are a major contributing factor to poor drug availability, especially in hard-to-reach areas of Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). An electronic Logistics Management Information System (eLMIS) which is driven by and connected to all end-users is essential for any functioning supply chain at national scale.
DHIS2 is already in use in more than 20 countries in Africa and Asia, as a “last-mile” solution for facility-level vaccine logistics or as cold chain registry and other eLMIS uses. To support this use, the HISP Centre at UiO is working with national and global partners to develop an open-source end-user eLMIS for LMICs that is integrated with the national DHIS2 health management information system (HMIS) as well as the national eLMIS.
Bringing monthly or real-time logistics data from health care facilities or even from the point of care together with epidemiological and programmatic data can greatly improve the ability to plan demand for health care products, improve the effectiveness and efficiency of supply chain management, monitor performance and identify logistical shortcomings and inefficiencies. DHIS2 is able to provide end-to-end visibility of the entire national supply network when used together with a full-scale, national eLMIS for managing procurement, demand planning, forecasting, warehousing, transportation and distribution.
On this page you can find more information about how DHIS2 can be deployed for logistics management, including key use cases, real-world examples, and links to useful resources. If you are interested in deploying DHIS2 for eLMIS or creating a custom logistics app for DHIS2, please contact us at lmis@dhis2.org