Towards seamless supply of family planning commodities

Islamabad: The federal as well as provincial and regional governments (FATA, AJ&K, Gilgit-Baltistan and ICT) have launched a web-based family planning executive dashboard that will ensure contraceptive commodity security by enabling managers to make better decisions in procurement planning, financing, inventory management, and stock monitoring.

Developed with the technical and financial support of USAID-funded Global Health Supply Chain Programme – Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project, the dashboard will enable sustained countrywide availability of essential family planning commodities at service delivery points and community level.

The family planning dashboard has the automated capability to generate ‘advisories’ addressed to appropriate senior level officers at the provincial and district levels where SDP stocks have gone below the safe and highly above policy determined margins. The dashboard focuses on engaging higher levels of management for their intervention at an appropriate time to ensure action throughout the supply chain hierarchy. It also generates automated emails and SMS alerts to intended recipients for actions.

According to the country head of the GHSC-PSM project Dr. Muhammad Tariq, the family planning dashboard will help the provinces to improve contraceptive stock availability at the district and SDP levels through use of cLMIS data for policy, procurement planning, financing and stock monitoring decision-making.

This public sector software provides logistics data for policy, procurement planning, financing and stock monitoring across the entire public health supply chain. It is thus a real time transactional information system that is different from the conventional District Health Information System (DHIS).

“A major stride in achieving this goal in Pakistan has been achieved, as stocks’ availability across the supply chain has now become fully visible with Microsoft 360 and other analytics. This dashboard enables the leadership and managers with necessary “business intelligence” at their fingertips to achieve commodity security in the country,” Dr. Tariq added.