Digital Square Investments in Global Goods:Approved Global Goods
What are Approved Global Goods?
Through Digital Square Procurement Processes such as the Open Application Process, Global Goods are reviewed by the Peer Review Committee. The Peer Review Committee reviews applications according to the Prioritization Framework, notice scope of work technical requirements and evaluates applications as green-, amber-, or red-lit per the Peer Review Committee Membership Policy. Green-lit applications are recommended for funding immediately; amber-lit applications are recommended for future funding or further exploration; red-lit applications do not fully meet the selection standards/criteria.
A green-lit application meets all criteria for investment through the relevant Notice. The application demonstrates a global good that aligns with country priorities, can adapt to different countries and contexts, and will scale easily across countries.
Digital Square compiles the evaluation provided by the Peer Review Committee by clustering the applications according to the Prioritization Framework for Governing Board review. Digital Square presents the applications, high-level budget summary, Peer Review Committee feedback within the Prioritization Framework, and Digital Square recommendation to the Governing Board.
These applications then receive one of three statuses from the Digital Square Governing Board:
- Approved - Fully Funded;
- Approved - Partially Funded;
- Approved - Contingent on Funding.
Applications that are Approved - Partially Funded or Approved - Contingent on Funding are included in the Digital Square global goods community, including webinars, the Digital Square Basket of Services, and continual funding raising efforts. A list of the global goods that are Approved - Partially Funded or Approved - Contingent Funding can be found below.
Digital Square continues to work closely with a diverse portfolio of investors, advocating for further investments in global goods. We are accelerating and scaling our efforts to expand resource mobilization for global goods and global digital health investments.
Based on feedback from the community, we are improving transparency about which proposals are approved but not yet funded, or are partially funded. Digital Square is working with partners and investors to draw visibility to the approved global good applications, which are currently seeking partial or full funding.
What are the benefits to a Digital Square approved global good?
Concept notes and subsequent applications submitted through the Digital Square open Notice cycles that are approved by the Digital Square Governing Board receive one of three statuses: Approved - Fully Funded; Approved - Partially Funded; Approved - Contingent on Funding. This delineation offers many benefits to organizations with approved global goods:
- Organizations can use their approved status to their advantage and to help encourage donor support for their global good outside of Digital Square.
- Organizations are included in a global good community in which Digital Square offers a platform for technical sharing and learning.
- Organizations can receive support for their global good from a âDigital Square Basket of Servicesâ, which includes in-kind technical, operational and communications assistance (pending staff availability).
- Organizations are able to receive in-kind technical assistance from the DIAL Open Source Center (pending staff availability).
- Digital Square continues to raise funds from a variety of investors to meet funding gaps for global goods approved by the Governing Board.
What kind of support do approved global goods receive from Digital Square?
Digital Square is expanding engagement and support to all approved global good implementers through our Notice cycles as well as our request for application (RFA)s (non-Notice cycle awards). In March 2019, we began offering monthly Global Good Webinars for the global good innovator community. The topics of the webinars range from technical, operational, and communications topics. Digital Square intends for these webinars to be an opportunity for the community to share, learn, and engage both with each other as well as the Peer Review Committee members, who are also invited to these webinars.
Digital Square also seeks to support innovators with in-kind support. We are currently offering a basket of services for Digital Square approved global goods including:
- Quality Assurance: We are able to lend our technical staff to run QA on your global good software to review functionality and test for bugs. We are also available to review technical documentation and training materials for clarity and ease of use.
- Communications: We provide services such as helping partners develop communications strategies and activities, and provide support to their communications products. Based on the Digital Square Communications team availability, these activities include:
- Inclusion in the Global Goods Guidebook which includes a two-page pull-out entry on each global good
- Amplification of news and announcements from the global goods community on the Digital Square social media platforms and global goods newsletter
- Thought partnership for strategic communication workshops to identify your audience and bring that audience to a deeper level of engagement
- Review of communications and advocacy materials such as flyers, presentations, website
- Review and/or co-creation of an article to highlight innovations and scale of your global good
- Social media guidance
- Engineering Support around OpenHIE: We are committed to supporting global good innovators in harnessing the OpenHIE architecture and standards. Linking with currently invested efforts in OpenHIE, we will support partners who need assistance in technical design and guidance to ensure that the global good works within the OpenHIE framework.
- Community Management Support: Despite our best efforts of engagement, it can be challenging for global good community managers to solicit input and get feedback from those implementing software in the field. We are able to support a working group of community managers to share and learn best practices for effective engagement of global good users including secretariat services, outreach approaches etc.
- Operations Support: We provide contractual capacity building resources as found on the Digital Square wiki including: grants and contracts basics, procurement and investment processes. For funded global good innovators through Digital Square, we provide deep dives into specific donor legal restrictions and terms & conditions and a designated operational point of contract for each subaward.
The type and degree to which Digital Square will be able to provide support is dependent on staff availability. We are committed to supporting organizations with approved status and will strive to respond to requests from global good innovators as quickly as possible.
How can approved global goods use this status to their advantage?
Amplify messaging for resource mobilization for global good
Approval through the Digital Square Procurement Processes is validation that a tool or software is an endorsed and approved global good in the digital health sector. We recommend approved global goods harness the talking points provided below, which illustrate the benefits of having an approved application through the Digital Square Open Application Process. These talking points can assist in business development and resource mobilization in support of approved global goods. The Talking Points include:
- Global Good application has been vetted and approved by an expert group of digital health stakeholders through the Digital Square Open Application Process.
- Organization has engaged with the larger global health community to validate and articulate the core/community support/application needs for the global good through the Digital Square Open Application Platform.
- Additional funding for the global good is augmented by the in-kind contributions of Digital Square and other stakeholders to amplify investments.
Global Goods Guidebook A number of global goods have been featured in version 1.0 of the Global Goods Guidebook, which was launched on May 28, 2019. The purpose of the Global Goods Guidebook is to help donors align around scalable, sustainable, accessible, interoperable, and evidence-based digital health global goods that meet country priorities. In addition, it is a guide for health information system designers, evaluators, and integrators to learn best practices in implementing global goods.
The guidebook is designed so that global good content can be extracted as a high-level, endorsed, two-page brief which you can use for advocacy and communication activities. Digital Square will include additional global goods in the guidebook after each Notice so if a global good is not yet featured, it will be included in future versions.
What is Digital Square doing to seek funding for green-lit proposals?
Digital Square continues to work closely with a diverse portfolio of investors, advocating for further investments in global goods. We are accelerating and scaling our efforts to expand resource mobilization for global goods and global digital health investments.
Based on feedback from the community, we are improving transparency about which proposals are approved but not yet funded, or are partially funded. Our updated wiki includes a high-level overview of approved applications so that donors may easily find approved applications. Digital Square is working with partners and investors to draw visibility to the approved global good applications, which are currently seeking partial or full funding.
List of Global Goods that are Approved - Contingent on Funding
List of Global Goods that are Approved - Partially Funded
DHIS2
- DHIS2 Community of Practice: The remaining unfunded work will support a full year of the DHIS2 COP to properly establish and institutionalize the CoP into the DHIS2 community. The additional year of funding support will further and solidify the CoPâs place in the community, meeting the demands and requirements by having dedicated staff and hence ensuring sustainability.
OpenELIS
- Integration of the OpenELIS open-source laboratory information system with leading clinical and logistics information systems: OpenELIS is an open-source electronic laboratory information system software used to track patient testing, diagnosis, and results communication.The remaining funded is needed for the workstream activity to merge the OpenELIS Global and Bahmni OpenELIS Code Bases.
OpenHIE
- An Instant OpenHIE: Support for building in clinical use cases that show the instant OpenHIE components working together in a clinical use case.
OpenHIM
- Strengthening and Expanding the Open Health Information Mediator (OpenHIM): The remaining unfunded work is for supporting implementers and the communtity around the core tool. Activities include updating and revisiting the full webpresense of the tool; updating the website and community platform tools; curation for the mediator library and updates to the core and common mediators.
OpenLMIS
- Advancing a collaborative, open, and growing community
OpenMRS
- Strengthening the OpenMRS implementer ecosystem through community, quality assurance, education, and partnership: Support for the implementer ecosystem through expanded partnerships in OpenMRS country implementation countries. Support for a toolkit and eLearning materials for implementers.
Bahmni
- Bahnmi Transition
- Bahmni Hospital System as a FOSS
Digital Health Atlas
eIDSR
- eIDSR: Core Development
Global Open Facility Registry
- Global Open Facility Registry: Connect
- Global Open Facility Registry: Core
iHRIS
- iHRIS Foundation
Open Data Kit
- Open Data Kit 2
OpenLMIS
- OpenLMIS Gap Project
- OpenLMIS Community Engagement
- OpenLMIS: Advancing the Community
This Notice C consortium proposal is being submitted on behalf of the OpenLMIS community to seek support for community-requested feature development (see the Project Description section for details). With this funding, the community can support the growing number of countries deploying OpenLMIS, while still remaining responsive to the needs of existing implementations. Specifically, the community will support the current deployment in Malawi and the upcoming deployments in Angola, Mozambique, and potentially in Benin and Cameroon. Notice C activities will include new community-requested features to support new implementations, conducting releases and maintenance/fixes, and helping implementations contribute their enhancements back to the shared global version, resulting in greater capacity for this open source community to support a larger number of adoptions on one shared, common codebase.
- Building an Open Source LIS Technologies COP
DHIS2
- DHIS2 Community of Practice
OpenMRS
- Strengthening OpenMRS
Healthsites
- Global Healthsites Mapping Project
Open Health Information Mediator (OpenHIM)
OpenCRVS
OpenSRP
OpenELIS
- Integration with Leading Clinical and Logistics Information Systems
This proposal will integrate the OpenELIS open-source LIS with the OpenMRS electronic medical record (EMR), with the integrated Bahmni clinical information system package, as well as with the OpenLMIS logistics management information system(LMIS). The project will advance interoperability of OpenELIS with other systems in the context of both direct bridges as well as linkage through heatlh information exchange (HIE), modeled on the OpenHIE framework. The proposed project will significantly advance flexible, standardized, deployable solutions for interoperability of OpenELIS with leading EMR and LMIS products, thereby improving the ability of the laboratory sector in LMICs to support laboratory monitoring for patient care and outbreak detection.
OpenMRS
- Strengthening the Implementation Ecosystem
Although often seen as a technical community, the OpenMRS community would not exist but for the broad ecosystem of implementations it serves. Despite the core mission to serve these implementations, OpenMRS falls short in dedicated resources to fully understand and track the wide variation of implementations, investigate and identify implementation best practices, and to be able to create a sustainable engagement strategy to provide the requested support from these implementers. Our team aims to strengthen OpenMRS by gaining insight into the impact of OpenMRS on country health systems by better understanding this growing ecosystem of OpenMRS implementers and the 3,000+ implementations of the OpenMRS system. Using these real-world cases, we propose to incorporate the identified needs of implementers and implementations into the community processes through the development of improved QA processes, publication of implementation toolkits and guidance documentation, development and dissemination of elearning components, and expanding the partnerships program to support implementers in the field. These processes, coupled with the published artifacts, should result in additional implementers and implementations - creating a long term sustainable ecosystem for OpenMRS.
OpenHIE
- An Instant OpenHIE
An Instant OpenHIE will radically reduce the costs and skills required for software developers to rapidly deploy OpenHIE architecture for quicker initial solution testing and faster production implementations. Instant OpenHIE will be a simple way for technical persons to install and see a complex system working for a real use case. It will allow technical persons to illustrate how interoperability will work to solve health challenges and show how a national interoperability architecture could be created with open source tools.
Child Growth Monitor
HEARTH
Open Data Kit
- Making ODK2 Accessible
Medic Mobile
- Medic Mobile Community of Practice
Mobile WACh
- Mobile WACh
mPowering Frontline Health Workers
- mPowering Frontline Health Workers Initiative
mSpray
- mSpray
SORMAS
- SORMAS
Open Concept Lab
- Strengthening OCL
Logistimo
- Logistimo: Scaling Health Worker Capacity
This project intends to enable a scalable model for ongoing capacity development of last-mile workers using a combination of:
- Easy-to-use self-serve, e-learning service with video content that enables self-learning and capacity assessments.
- Community interactions with peer co-workers, supervisors or experts through an online group accessible within their mobile applications, which offers a sustained high-touch support. Such a group enables one to ask or answer questions online, as well as share of best practices.
Both of these will be made contextually accessible through the Iota and Pulse mobile applications that are already in use. The former enables deeper self-learning, while the latter enables ongoing learning through human mentorship that anyone in the community can offer online.
Lorem Ipsum for Digital Health
Lorem Ipsum for Digital Health will create a harmonized synthetic data generator for malaria or HIV/AIDS that can be used by software developers, policy-makers, and researchers to improve the functionality and data analysis capabilities of DHIS 2, OpenMRS, iHRIS, and related services like OpenInfoMan, Global Open Facility Registry, and more. This new data will be statistically similar to country-level realities yet totally safe for public usage across the global digital health community.
Planwise: Optimizing Geospatial Network Coverage
Planwise is an open source software tool that uses geospatial modeling and optimization techniques to make it simple for an organization to understand whom they are helping, and to maximize the efficiency impact of their services. Specifically, it shows a user what the current coverage and capacity of the network is, and then produces scenarios for how to best enhance access to care; for the least amount of funding.
Open Child Helpline System (OpenCHS) Community of Practice
The Child Helpline System is an Open Source Case Management System that supports reporting and case management of abuse cases of children through various channels of communication including calls, SMS and CHAT. Child Helplines are operational in more than 147 countries around the World. They play a critical role in Child Protection Systems by providing a reporting mechanism by adults and children on incident or risk of any abuse, violence and exploitation happening against any child. The goal of this project is to build an OpenCHS Community of Practice to coordinate and consolidate contributions and efforts from various partners. We intend to establish a curated and moderated one-stop virtual space for engagement, knowledge sharing and learning amongst OpenCHS implementers, developers and users.
OpenELIS within Laboratory Information Systems Community of Practice
The proposed project will significantly improve resources which enable health sector personnel to efficiently deploy, adopt, and use OpenELIS, advance awareness of the features and value proposition of the OpenELIS product within the laboratory sector in LMIC, and widen the community of stakeholders interested in maintaining and enhancing OpenELIS and other open-source LIS for long-term sustainability of system implementations and software products. Together the activities will contribute to improved availability of viable open-source LIS which support quality of laboratory practice in low and middle income countries (LMICs).
Pharmadex: Enhancing the Medicines Registration Application
Management Sciences for Health (MSH) has developed a web-based tool, Pharmadex, to help NMRAs streamline the process. Pharmadex is being used by four NMRAs to ensure that they have the most updated medicines available and approved for prescribing. We propose to add features such as multiple language support, user-configurable logos, and ability for each country to define their own fields and variables to ensure that NMRAs that have requested an application for use can easily adopt Pharmadex for their country contexts.
