Expanding Lesotho’s Electronic “Informed Push” System to Improve Supply Management and Planning

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Ensuring Lesotho’s health clinics are stocked with essential supplies is no easy task in the rugged and mountainous nation known as the “Kingdom of the Sky.” While the distance and poor road networks between central warehouses and remote facilities make physically delivering supplies difficult, the challenges are compounded by supply chain management issues such as inaccurate forecasting by facilities, cumbersome financial processes for ordering medicines, and poor coordination among programs and partners. These challenges can lead to stockouts of medicine and pose a threat to patients’ health in the nation with the second highest HIV prevalence in the world

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The USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project – established in Lesotho in 2016 with a budget of $5.5 million – strengthens the country’s health commodity supply chain. In collaboration with the Ministry of Health, the project is expanding electronic data collection, and providing technical assistance in supply chain forecasting, inventory management, and planning and distribution. These strategies have improved access to health supplies by making supply chain records more readily available, reducing data errors, and improving productivity at the central warehouse. The result is an increasingly optimized health commodity supply chain that brings long-term time and cost savings.

One of the program’s most impactful activities to date has been the expansion of the “informed push” system nationwide, which uses electronic data to manage Lesotho’s health commodity supply chain. This automated system allows health facility staff to use electronic tablets to upload information about health commodity stock currently at the facility, and quantities of stock received from the central warehouse.

By connecting to the National Ministry of Health’s web-based platform for health records, the system automatically calculates the quantity of new supplies the facility needs to ensure a continuous supply of critical health commodities and minimal waste of unused supplies. This alleviates the burden felt by often understaffed facilities to manually enter stock data into paper-based records and forecast supply needs.

Fast fact: The electronic system speeds up the transmission of data from facilities to the central level by an average of 4 days – resulting in quicker access to data for decision-making, accurate supply tracking, improved forecasting, and rapid supply chain analysis at the district and central medical stores levels.

Through the web-based supply request system, facility staff were able to improve data clarity and delivery times to increase commodity availability in last-mile storage sites. Additionally, the electronic system enhances data visibility and transparency at all levels of the supply chain – an improvement that can reduce overall cost and help health officials at the central, district, and facility levels to analyze supply chain data for decision-making. Project staff are currently working to expand the informed push system and training on how to use the system to additional government facilities, as well as non-profit facilities run by the Christian Health Association of Lesotho and private clinics.

In the coming three years, GHSC-PSM will continue expanding the informed push system to additional facilities. Working hand in hand with central and district health officers and facility health workers, the program will promote the tools and processes needed to ensure patients have access to vital health supplies such as antiretrovirals to treat HIV.

Currently GHSC-PSM’s program in Lesotho has supported one third of the nation’s health facilities use of the tablet-based system to upload supply chain data. The electronic informed push system saves these facilities valuable time by automatically calculating the average monthly consumption of commodities – a previously time-consuming and error-prone exercise that was done manually with a calculator for each of a facility’s approximately 100 items ordered.