Digital Square Investments in Global Goods

Calls for Proposals

Digital Square routinely releases calls for proposals to invest in Digital Health Global Goods.

Proposal Process Timelines

The following outlines the timelines of proposal process:

Step #	Action	Approximate Timeline
Step 1: Concept note phase	Digital Square issues call for proposals, and submitters upload concept notes to Digital Square public-facing platform. During the 3-4 weeks, the Peer Review Committee, other submitters, and other stakeholders can provide feedback, comments, suggestions, and identify potential areas for collaboration.	3-4 weeks
Step 2: Proposal co-creation phase	Using feedback received in the Concept Note Phase, submitters begin proposal development. Iterations may be posted on the forum. The Peer Review Committee, other submitters, and other stakeholders can continue to provide feedback, comments, and suggestions.	4 weeks
Step 3: Proposal finalization phase	Using feedback, submitters develop budget and finalized proposal and submit to the Digital Square public-facing platform. The budget is not shared publicly on the platform. The PRC sees only the high-level budget and LOE percentages.	2 weeks
Step 4: PRC review phase	The Peer Review Committee reviews proposals according to Peer Review Committee criteria and votes on green-, amber-, or red-lit status.	3 weeks
Step 5: Board review phase	Digital Squares presents the proposals, budget, and breakdown of Peer Review Committee votes to the Governing Board, which votes for investment.	1 month
Step 6: Award phase	The result of the Governing Board vote and Peer Review Committee feedback are communicated to the submitters.

Current and Upcoming Calls for Proposals

We expect to open the next round of proposals in mid-November, 2017.

• Notice B (Concept Note Due January 17, 2018)

Past Calls for Proposals

• Notice A (Closed August 25, 2017)

Current Investments

Bahmni: Transition

In collaboration with DIAL, Digital Square is supporting the evolution the Bahmni governance by creating a new Bahmni Coalition and giving it full ownership over the Bahmni product and initiative, transforming Bahmni from being a ThoughtWorks-owned-and-operated project to a collaborative open-source one hosted through OpenMRS Inc. To speed up and smooth this transition, Digital Square and DIAL are supporting the following activities:

• Collaborative development work on community-prioritized product evolution
• Set-up of processes and tooling for FOSS development
• Creation of a Development Team Reference Manual
• Development of Standard Processes for Subcontracting
• Transitioning of Bahmni IP from ThoughtWorks to the coalition

Digital Health Atlas: Core Development and Implementation Support

In collaboration with the WHO, we are supporting an upgrade of the existing Digital Health Atlas to provide country portals and country requested functionality. The Digital Health Atlas is a web-based based technology registration and assessment system that enables governments, technologists, and implementers, as well as donors, to manage information about existing and new digital health deployments. It supports cataloging related to scale, functionality, data capture and use, interoperability and standards, as well as use-cases and geographical scope of deployment. Collaborative functional requirements gathering with intended users of the registration system in the West African region will guide the specific functionality of the system and ensure usability, stakeholder relevance, and uptake. Support will be provided to Ebola affected countries.

eIDSR: Core Development

Jembi Health Systems, Vecna Cares, Dimagi and Fio are developing an integrated disease surveillance solution that leverages the value of each of their technological innovations and our community of practice in interoperability. At the core, the solution would see the enabling of CommCare and Fionet to leverage published health standards (OpenHIE, HL7 FHIR) to communicate with a Health Information Exchange through the OpenHIM and submit and query patient level data. The system would also show the ability to trigger alerts based on submitted data and create the opportunity to have patient level data feed a national data warehouse (such as DHIS2) and leverage mHero for communication. This system would ease the burden on community health workers, clinicians, laboratory technicians, and health center admin in under-resourced areas through a more seamless connection between and visibility of data collection points, diagnostics, and workflow support. Government bodies and implementing partners would have better visibility into the data collection and management through this cohesive integrated approach to infectious disease data management. Most importantly, this sustainable solution would provide beneficiaries in critical areas a faster, more reliable connection to critical care and diagnostics for the disease burden pertinent to their district, region, or country.

Global Open Facility Registry (GOFR): Core Development and Implementation

A consortium comprising eHealth Africa, IntraHealth, JSI, and RTI are working on the development of curation tools for managing multiple list of health facilities in order to support ministries of health efforts to develop and maintain a Master Facility List and link with existing public sources of health facility data. Country specific support for implementation of the GOFR tools is being provided to Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

iHRIS Foundation: Core Development and Community Support

The iHRIS Foundation , with IntraHealth as secretariat, will focus the development of features and functions to respond to requests from the iHRIS community, including ministries of health and health professional associations; as well as prepare the platform for broader use in new domains. Freed from the strict structure of projects and dependency on piecemeal funding, the iHRIS community, led by the Foundation, will be able to address longstanding issues that affect all users and offer support for new architectures to optimize the functionality and power of iHRIS. New tools, documentation, and capabilities for iHRIS will make it easier to use, more powerful, and more interoperable with the various health information ecosystems utilized by the global community. Improved and more readily available training and learning materials will increase the number of users and their capacity for making full use of the software. These improvements to iHRIS will provide the men and women who make decisions regarding human resources in the health sector with the data they need to better understand how their health systems are working, where their needs are greatest, and how to best meet those needs.

Open Data Kit 2 (ODK2): Core Development and Transition

Global development organizations, and country-based programs increasingly rely on mobile data collection and management tools for a wide range of activities relating to the measurement, evaluation, and delivery of health programs. The collection and use of accurate and timely data is essential to organizations, their intended beneficiaries, and donors. ODK 2.0, from University of Washington, builds on the experience of ODK 1.0. ODK 2.0 has been under development for a number of years and needs to be transitioned to a multi-stakeholder open source community as part of support for more complex mobile data collection scenarios:

• Data management needs are increasing as mobile data collection moves away from collecting one-time survey data to collecting longitudinal data.
• As tools extend to more sophisticated applications, a deployment architect must be able to perform the necessary customizations to locality and over time. ·
• With a growing ecosystem of global good software tools, it is important to have seamless configuration, interoperability and linkages between tools
  • Network infrastructure and connectivity continue to pose significant challenges to mobile data collection, so it is essential that tools function in environments with intermittent mobile connectivity.

OpenLMIS: Core Development and Community Support

A consortium comprising VillageReach, JSI and Ona will develop the features identified during the recent gap analysis work. The consortium seeks to provide the following outcomes:

• Provide feature parity between TZM eLMIS and OpenLMISv3 to the greatest degree possible within funding limits, thereby enabling a cost-effective and efficient path for existing eLMIS countries to upgrade to v3.x
• Add compelling new features and enhancements to existing and new modules using the improved architecture for new country adoption
• Grow the OpenLMIS community by developing Africa-based resources that can eventually serve as software development and implementation partners, regional support centers and code schools.
• Support the OpenLMIS community by continuing to support the Core team providing fundamental support to the community and facilitate the governance, product and technical committees.

Past Investments

OpenLMIS: Gap Analysis

In the spring of 2017, Digital Square, in collaboration with Village Reach, supported JSI to conduct a gap analysis between the functionality present in eLMIS and that in OpenLMIS 3.x to ensure that countries wishing to adopt OpenLMIS 3.x have an upgrade path. Identified functional gaps were prioritized based on country needs.