Duration: Jan. 2022 – Dec. 2024

Donor:

Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Country: Ethiopia

Partner organization: Cordaid

Introduction and Goals

i+solutions is working together with Cordaid on The Last Mile Project in the Jimma zone in Ethiopia to support the availability of quality medicines in health facilities by introducing Medexis as a stock management software in select health facilities, covering four phases since 2022. The project focuses on three interconnected outcomes:

1. Simplified digital reporting and ordering of medicines by health centres from the Ethiopian Pharmaceuticals Supply Service (EPSS).
2. Increased efficiency and accuracy of the supply chain through real-time visibility and transparency.
3. Strong pharmaceutical supply chain management systems.

Approach and Solution:

In 2023, Phase 3, focusing on the optimization of Medexis functionalities and the expansion to 88 health facilities in the Jimma Zone was concluded and Phase 4 was launched. Phase 4 supports the further expansion of Medexis to additional health centers and improved robustness of the eLMIS system in the Jimma Zone by:

• integrating the Ethiopian calendar
• introducing vaccine management
• enhancing the analytics capacities through PowerBI
• integrating annual forecasting and quantification and
• preparing for the use of sub-units.

Phase 4 also focuses on increasing the capacity of health workers through a Quality Assurance and Supply Chain course and supports the recognition of the system on a national scale through the national registration process. These initiatives reinforce the capacities of Medexis and its users to ensure that the system is operating at optimal capacity within Ethiopia, creating evidence to support the eventual expansion into additional regions.

Results

The introduction of Medexis in 29 health centres showed significant improvements in key performance indicators:

The introduction of Medexis also led to qualitative improvements:

• Health centre staff spent less time on managing their medical supply chain. Single data entry resulted in minimised errors.
• Staff at zonal, district and EPSS levels base their decisions on data and real-time analytics.
• Service delivery to health centres was uninterrupted, even in low-bandwidth settings.
• Configuration responds to the
  Ethiopian last mile context.