DHIS started as an aggregated reporting system to manage health information system. By user needs it evolved with many other features. One of them is “tracker”, which is basically managing an individual patient’s information. And now user demands even more features from the system. In recent years, there are many discussions going on implementing or integrating Logistics Management Information System (LMIS) in DHIS2.
Many countries where DHIS2 system is running, are requesting for LMIS in DHIS2. One of the reason of this demand is because, health system relies on life saving commodities. It is very important to ensure stocks at all time. This is why LMIS is becoming an important topic for DHIS2. In general, LMIS itself is quite complex system. To keep it simple, we are only focusing on small parts which are related to LMIS in DHIS2.
A similar request came from Uganda. They wanted to send commodity supply request to higher authorities through DHIS2 system. Their current system is based on paper based manual process. In the paper based system, they write their current commodity stock in paper and how many they needed for next period by calculating manually. But this paper report is not submitted to the higher management in time due to many reason.
To solve this problem we can create an app for DHIS2. This app will be simple in nature. The main target of this app will be to send supply orders to higher management. To do so, we can design a simple form, where user can enter commodity name and the quantity need to be ordered. After filling the form user will hit the “Send Order” button and the order will be placed into the system. Higher management also get a notification of the order request so that they can take action.
A sample order form might look like the picture below. User can write/choose from commodity name and the number of items. The number of commodity name is variable. It could be 3 or 5 or 10, depends on the user.
One way to send a notification to the higher management user is to use the DHIS2 messaging system. When a user press the submit button an auto generated message will sent to the corresponding user.
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