Procurement operations functionality will be made available in the next release.

Most Health Commodities carry batch/lot numbers and Medexis tracks those, including expiry date from Point-of-Entry (typically Central Medical Store) down to the level of Health Service Delivery point. Single point of data entry principle applies, and all respective data will systematically move along the distribution path to intermediate storage points and eventually to the Health Service Delivery point, without re-entering data and thus securing data quality. Using the ‘Expiration date”, “Transaction” and the “Inventory” reports, the user will be able to trace the whereabouts of each batch, making the processing of, for instance, a recall for quality purposes a less time-consuming task. The system’s integrated nature allows central level oversight over the execution of the recall at all levels, including the quarantining.

Since the introduction of disease-specific approaches (National Health Programs), either Government or Development Partner (Donor) funded, national health supply chains may consist of multiple parallel logistic systems. Medexis is designed to handle such health program specific parallel supply systems in a single platform, simplifying staff’s workload (single system versus multiple program specific systems) and forming a first stepping-stone for eventual re-integration once circumstances allow. Similarly, Medexis ensures the tracking of commodities, donated or funded by Development Partners, throughout the national supply chain. At any point in time, the respective Development Partner can be informed of the exact physical whereabouts of their donated/funded product or the consumption thereof. A unique feature of the Medexis platform.

Each facility of the national supply system (be it the Central Medical Store, a 3PL provider, a district store, or a hospital, clinic or health centre) can define their facility’s specific storage structure. For instance, a provincial warehousing facility can configure each of their warehouse(s) including respective bin/locations. Similarly, a provincial hospital can configure their storage and health services structure, for example central pharmacy, in-patient pharmacy, out-patient dispensing booths or wards; each of them with specific named storage locations, where necessary and useful. Inventory management will report on the exact inventory whereabouts as per the facility’s storage structure, which also allows for the setup of ‘unserviceable’ locations, such as quarantine, expired product or damaged product locations.

Key enabler for enhanced user-guidance on best-practise inventory management are the settings for inventory management targets, such as emergency level, re-ordering level and maximum at health commodity / health facility level. As per the specificities of the national system at hand, Medexis will periodically advise adjusted inventory setpoints based on recent transactional data of respective facility. Medexis alerts responsible staff on ‘near-stock-out” and ensures that products timely re-ordered (requisition). Similarly, Medexis will report on over-stockage situations.

Medexis comes with functionality to periodic check the facility’s available stocks paper-based or using handheld devices. Inventory check-ups can be initiated by warehouse, commodity or partner.

Level of Care parameters embed the national policy on health commodity eligibility at each health care delivery level in Medexis. Typically, a country’s Essential Medicine List also defines which health services/care level can administer which product. Using the configured values, Medexis can assist in enforcement of these guidelines, typically an important accomplishment towards rational use of drugs.

Requisitioning is the process of a health facility creating the list of health commodities low in stock that need replenishment. In paper-based LMIS situations, the completion of the periodic requisitioning forms is a seriously time-consuming activity for health facility staff and refrains them from providing health services. Medexis’ paradigm shift from ‘reporting to recording’ becomes ultimately beneficial here. In Medexis, creating a new requisition would not take more than a couple of minutes.

Medexis assists the requisitioning process by populating (filling out) a draft requisition for the user’s review, allowing manual adjustment where deemed necessary. The draft requisition will factor in stock-on-hand, stock-on-order, level of care and the pre-configured inventory management policy. In addition, Medexis supports the creation of health program specific requisitions, for instance a requisition solely for the National HIV/Aids program. Reviewed requisitions can be submitted for validation by a single button-click. In-built workflow management will present the requisition to the configured user for validation/approval. This could be health program specific, as well. Once validated, the requisition gets converted to an order and the requestor gets notified via the Medexis APP. In the event of a rejection the requestor gets notified as well with a clarification included.

Validated requisitions are included in the order fulfilment workflow of the origin warehouse facility, which is resupplying the requesting health facility. Various descriptive order statuses will ensure necessary order fulfilment supervisory overview and progress monitoring. Triggered by the warehouse manager, Medexis auto-allocates inventory to the order lines based on FEFO (or FIFO, where applicable), ensuring first expiring inventory is distributed first, and skipping any expired inventory. Medexis supports stock-rationing by the warehouse manager to mitigate stock-shortage situations, which may exist at the storage facility.

In Medexis, the warehouse’s physical picking & packing process can be paper-based or driven by handheld-device, whatever best suits the operational maturity status of that warehouse. Completion of an order’s picking & packing process will result in the creation of a consignment. Partially fulfilled orders will re-join the start of the order fulfilment workflow with back-order status or can be short-closed.

Consignments are completed (picked & packed) orders, which are ready to be transported to their respective final destinations. Typically, consignments are stored (or marshalled) at the dispatch bay of the storage facility. Medexis supports the operational management of status and whereabouts of each individual consignment, meanwhile auto-recording milestone dates for performance monitoring objectives. Consignment details available in Medexis, such as destination, weight and volume, assist the transport scheduling process. Packing list (batch level detail) and delivery note are directly printed from Medexis, as en when needed. All consignment details are automatically forwarded to the Medexis APP of the destination facility (Advanced Shipment Notice (ASN)) during the transport process.

In principle health facilities get resupplied through a national supply chain, however lateral inflow of health commodities may exist in real practise. For instance, the default national supply chain may experience availability problems and health facilities could be allowed procuring the needed commodities themselves on the local private market instead. A second example is locally donated product.

Medexis’ LPO receipt function allows the health facility to register and receive lateral inflow of health commodities, ensuring that its inventory and consumption can be maintained in an integrated manner. This way a comprehensive logistics overview will be guaranteed, and a complete consumption data set is available for national forecasting exercises.

Medexis’ transport management offers functionality to combine multiple consignments in optimized shipments, while vehicle loading capacity is being observed. Shipment status will facilitate the successful monitoring of shipment workflow and its progress. Freight forwarder, vehicle registration number and driver name are saved against each shipment and milestone dates are automatically registered as the shipment progresses.

Integration with Google Maps ensures optimized delivery routing, estimated distance/duration. Once shipments are composed all related documentation, such as Waybills, Packing lists and Delivery notes is digitally available, but can also be printed to accompany the consignments in the delivery process.

All ‘in-transit’ shipments can be monitored in Medexis, showing delivery progress in Google Maps integration. Health facilities are alerted automatically as soon as the transport vehicle departs from the origin facility. The full dataset of the consignment is also pushed to the Medexis APP of the destination facility and includes product, batch, quantity, donor and expiry date information to support the consignment validation at the destination facility. A two-step consignment delivery workflow allows for swift handling of the delivery between driver and destination facility, whereby the consignment initially gets an arrived status using the Medexis APP.

National health systems are typically structured around geographical/administrative areas (districts, LGAs, provinces, …) and health facility groups are supervised i.e. by a District Health Management team. Medexis supports the configuration along both supply chain hierarchy and administrative levels. This in combination with user role settings allows supervisory access to all health facilities subordinate to the respective Health Management team. Besides the general reporting and alert functionality, Medexis offers supervisory functionality

Medexis offers basic financial budget management functionality, that offsets the value of delivered health commodities, including the value of any pending deliveries, against the annual budget of respective facility. The requisition validation screen displays all budgetary information to support the validator and blocks the requisition approval once the budget gets exceeded.

Medexis offers basic financial budget management functionality, that offsets the value of delivered health commodities, including the value of any pending deliveries, against the annual budget of respective facility. The requisition validation screen displays all budgetary information to support the validator and blocks the requisition approval once the budget gets exceeded.

An important intervention tool for the supervisory level is the Inter-facility transfer functionality. The supervisory level, i.e. the District’s Logistics Management Unit, can coordinate the re-distribution of health commodities between health facilities. Such interventions can be initiated i.e. to circumvent unnecessary stock expiry or prevent stock-out situations. Inter-facility transfers are handled through the order workflow and the transport of the resulting consignments are coordinated in the transport management module.

Medexis comes with a programmable alerts and notifications module. Users can be alerted on extraordinary situations, such as approaching stock-out situations or delivery notifications. Likewise, they can be informed on progress of routine activities, such as order fulfilment or non-availability. Messaging is done through the WEB application, email or push messages to the user’s Medexis APP. Medexis comes with a basic setup but additional alerts can be customized.

The consumption report is an on-screen report displaying actual consumption by time-periods and year-to-date. The presented data can be filtered by commodity and/or facility and could even be filtered by warehouse/ward within a selected facility. The consumption aggregation report, a variation of the consumption report, offers a national level report, with capability to drill-down on program, geographical area or batch numbers. The reporting columns can be selected by the user and the on-screen report can be exported to MS Excel with a single click.

The inventory report provides access to inventory status across the full range of the storage & distribution system (pyramid). The on-screen report allows the data to be filtered by commodity, program, facility, warehouse/ward and batch, or any combination thereof. Where needed, the report can also be aggregated to national level with a single click. The inventory aggregation report, a variation of the inventory report, offers a national level report, with capability to drill-down on program, geographical area or batch numbers. The reporting columns can be selected by the user and the on-screen report can be exported to MS Excel with a single click.

At any point, the user can run the expiry report to get informed on the shelf life status of commodities expiring with the next 90 days. The report combines both expired and near-expiry commodities on one on-screen report. Filters will assist the user to zoom in commodity, batch number, facility and warehouses to focus. This report will be instrumental in active shelf life management to reduce expiry on the shelf situations. The Inter Facility Transfer functionality will be the key intervention mechanism.

The Stock-out report provides an overview of current out of stock situations and allows for filtering by commodity and/or by facility. The reporting columns can be selected by the user and the on-screen report can be exported to MS Excel with a single click.

Complementary to the Stock-out report, Medexis also auto-collects historical stock-out events in a separate table, detailing facility, product, start & end date and duration. This feature, which is unique to Medexis, avails the critical dataset need for the mathematical correction of annual consumption data. Consumption data, which is corrected for stock-outs, will significantly improve the data quality of the annual forecasting & quantification exercise and Medexis supports such advanced forecasting methodology.

Although health pyramids, that use Medexis as Logistic Management Information System, will not be using the conventional LMIS report, the system can print the conventional LMIS report. This may give the user the additional reassurance that an end-to-end product tracking system like Medexis is fit for the job.