Lynn C. Fritz Medal for Excellence in Humanitarian Logistics 2023: International Medical Corps

Winner Lynn C. Fritz Medal for Excellence in Humanitarian Logistics
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with paper and Excel is like driving a car
while looking in the rearview mirror.”
In 2015, International Medical Corps decided
that the time of paper mountains
must end. A team searched for solutions
on the market—in vain. The software
tools it found were either very expensive
or unsuitable for use in disaster relief. So
in 2018, the organization made the decision
to develop a solution internally.
Unlike other organizations or companies
in which a manager delegates a project
from the top down, International Medical
Corps chose a bottom-up approach: in
concrete terms, this means that employees
from the entire organization participate—pharmacists,
logisticians, doctors,
technicians and experts from the finance
and legal departments. The advantage
of this approach is that the combined
knowledge of everyone involved in the
process is used in product development.
“We developed PIMS to meet the diverse
organizational needs that cover
the lifecycle of a product, from planning,
procurement, transportation and
storage, to dispensing to beneficiaries,”
Alarcon explains. From his perspective,
the ability to ensure that the right medicines
were available at health facilities
in the right quantities, properly prescribed
and dispensed, was overdue. All
of these factors can significantly affect
the quality of health services for patients.
Better outcomes strengthen trust in the
health system and ultimately lead to
lower mortality.
International Medical Corps relied on
proven technologies to develop the system.
With the help of scanners, barcodes
on the medicines are captured, and basic
information about the items and the
transactions is transferred into the system.
PIMS uses simple, user-friendly interfaces
so that users can easily enter relevant
supply-chain information and basic patient
data while the system uses preset
algorithms in the background to augment
the collected data. This enables the system
to provide real-time statistical data
and generate alerts so that supply-chain
managers can take timely action and run
their projects more efficiently.
The results are impressive. Compared to
other solutions on the market, PIMS has
many unique features. One of PIMS’ key
differentiators is its ability to manage all
types of goods from the central warehouse
to the end-user, providing full visibility of
all movements of goods within the supply
chain in the last mile. Time-consuming
practices and procedures dominated by
manual spreadsheets are eliminated, resulting
in greater efficiency and accuracy
as well as streamlined operations.
Because PIMS enables accurate and efficient
data collection and timely, flexible
reporting, it increases process transparency
for physicians, supply-chain
managers and other staff, ministries of
health and funders. Importantly, it frees
up healthcare professionals to focus on
patient care. PIMS also helps users with
quantification, pharmacovigilance and
drug-utilization review when dispensing
medications.
Another plus is that the tool, which runs
in the cloud but also locally, can be easily
adapted to any language needed. PIMS
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