Imagine a healthcare system where every vital and essential medicine is available when and where it’s needed, ensuring timely treatment and improved health outcomes. This is the vision that drives us at inSupply Health. In the last couple of years, we have been on the ground in Kenya, working hand-in-hand with county governments to strengthen their capacity in forecasting, financing, and procuring Maternal Newborn Child Health and other essential Health Products and Technologies (HPT).
Recently, we proudly supported five counties in Kenya to forecast their HPT needs, generating a comprehensive picture of requirements down to the facility level, and aggregated upwards to inform county-wide planning. This crucial step, however, highlighted a persistent challenge: the significant disparity between identified needs and available resources.
The reality is that allocated budgets often fall short of the comprehensive needs identified through forecasting. This necessitates difficult decisions – how can we allocate limited funds in a way that ensures the most essential health products are available where they’re needed most? The challenge isn’t just about procurement; it’s about making equitable, data-driven choices that reflect actual need across facilities and sub-counties.
The Challenge: Navigating Scarcity and Ensuring Impact
Currently, the process of procuring Health Products and Technologies (HPTs) involves two major decision points: allocation and prioritization, which are both essential for ensuring that limited resources are used effectively, and yet both face major challenges.
The first challenge lies in allocation. Currently, the allocation of resources across facilities is a manual, non-standardized, and largely non-evidence-based process. Historically, allocation has relied on workload data, particularly patient volume, based on the assumption that the more patients a facility sees, the more resources it should get. But this is misleading. Workload is a service statistic—it tells us how many people visited, not what commodities were actually used. It fails to capture actual consumption, demand patterns, or unmet needs, making it an unreliable metric for resource allocation decisions. This results in frequent misalignment between what facilities receive and what they actually need.
Once allocations are made, facilities face a second challenge: prioritizing what to procure within their limited budgets. Currently, the process of prioritizing HPT procurement can be fragmented and lacks robust documentation. Decisions, often made at the HPT Unit level and guided by national policies and local context, may not always be fully informed by the granular needs of individual health facilities. This can lead to a concerning paradox: stockouts of life-saving commodities alongside potential overstocking of less critical items. The result? Compromised patient care and inefficient use of limited precious resources.
The Solution: Introducing the Strategic Resource Management Tool (SRMT)
Recognizing this critical gap, inSupply Health, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Health through the Directorate of Health Products and Technologies, dedicated county teams, and supply chain partners (CIPS and Thinkwell), embarked on a co-creation journey. Our goal was to design a practical and effective process to empower counties to make more informed and impactful HPT resource allocation and procurement decisions at all levels. This collaborative effort has culminated in the development of the Strategic Resource Management Tool (SRMT).
The SRMT is designed to tackle three fundamental challenges head-on:
- Efficient Resource Allocation at the County Level: The tool provides county HPTU teams with a more data-driven starting point for allocating available funds. By leveraging facility-level forecasted needs and optional workload data, the SRMT offers a transparent view of resource requirements across sub-counties and their respective facilities. This empowers decision-makers to allocate funds more equitably and strategically while allowing for necessary contextual adjustments. The value-add here is clear: a more scientific and visible distribution of resources, leading to faster decisions and financial and supply planning that is informed by data and priorities.
- Commodity Prioritization at the Facility Level: This is where the SRMT truly shines. At each facility, the tool employs a smart, algorithmic workflow to prioritize HPTs based on a combination of crucial factors:
- Essentiality (VEN Classification): Categorizing products as vital, essential, or non-essential, aligning with national essential lists and essential service packages. Facilities take the lead in ensuring they undertake VEN for their facility; the facility-led VEN classification is what the tool uses to prioritize
- Value (ABC Classification): Analyzing consumption patterns to identify high, medium, and low-consumption value commodities. The classification is based on both the cost and usage volume of commodities, making it facility-specific.
- Current Stock on Hand: Factoring in existing inventory levels to avoid unnecessary procurement.
- Allocated Amounts: Considering the budget allocated to the facility by the county.
The algorithm begins by factoring in current stock-on-hand data, deprioritizing commodities that already have sufficient inventory to cover the entire order or procurement period. It then intelligently adjusts commodity procurement or order quantities by deprioritizing non-essential, low-demand items while proportionally retaining the quantities of critical high-demand commodities.
This ensures that limited resources are directed towards the most impactful health products. This intelligent prioritization is the core value proposition of the SRMT, directly mitigating facility-specific risks of stockouts for critical and essential medicines.
- Enhanced Visibility and Control at the Sub-County Level: The benefits of the SRMT extend beyond individual facilities. Once facilities have generated their prioritized procurement lists, sub-county teams are better equipped to play their roles. With their new visibility into aggregated orders and costs, they can validate these lists, ensuring alignment with allocated amounts and sub-county-level stock availability, and prevent facilities from prioritizing products that are already adequately stocked within their jurisdiction. This added layer of oversight promotes efficiency and prevents duplication of effort.
The Impact: Towards a More Resilient and Responsive Healthcare System
The Strategic Resource Management Tool is more than just a software solution; it represents a fundamental shift towards a more transparent, efficient, responsive, and data-driven health supply chain. By empowering county HPTUs to allocate resources strategically and enabling commodity managers at facilities to intelligently prioritize essential commodities, the SRMT:
- Enhances transparency by providing visibility and a data-driven approach to inform resource allocation and procurement decisions.
- Maximizes effective use of scarce resources by ensuring that limited resources are directed towards the health products that will positively affect patient outcomes.
- Contributes to improved health outcomes by ensuring the consistent availability of critical health products at the point of service delivery.
The development of the SRMT is a testament to the power of collaboration and a shared commitment to strengthening health systems and supply chains. We at inSupply Health are excited about the potential of this tool to bridge the gap between HPT needs and available resources and empower users to use their data to make strategic choices to prioritize health outcomes specific to their context, ultimately contributing to a healthier future for the people of Kenya. As we continue to roll out and refine the SRMT, we look forward to witnessing its positive impact on the ground, one prioritized procurement list at a time.
This work was conducted with support from the Gates Foundation through the Workforce Development in Public Health Supply Chains project, which aims to improve the effectiveness, sustainability, and resilience of public health supply chains for essential medicines and supplies in East Africa and beyond.
