The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is issuing a request for information (RFI) to identify innovators who have the ability to combine several critical accelerators to dramatically scale up comprehensive PHC access in low- and lower-middle income countries.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aligns with the WHO’s call for primary health care (PHC) toward
Universal Health Coverage, which is the only “affordable dream” of expanding coverage to 3.8 billion
additional people by 2030.
This request for information seeks to identify innovators who have the ability to combine several critical
accelerators to dramatically scale up comprehensive PHC access in low- and lower-middle income
countries (LMICs), as we seek to forge new partnerships toward UHC.
Please submit a pitch deck (e.g., PPT, PDF) that provides an overview of your business model,
size of your organization, current geographic coverage, current population covered and projections for
the population covered in future, PHC service scope, and any other information you choose to highlight.
However, we ask that you completely address Section 1 (A-D), Section 2 (A-F), and Section 3 (A-C),
noting “not applicable” or “attribute not included” to any part of Sections 1-3 if the innovation does not
cover the attribute or requirement. Alternatively, please feel free to submit a write-up (e.g., Word
document) that addresses the same sections completely.
Send responses as soon as possible, but no later than Oct. 1, 2018
I think we should take every occasion we have, to show OpenMRS to Bill and Melinda Foundation - one of the biggest funders for social good programs for LMIC there is, which rarely have the open request for proposals (or they are very specific) and usually seek partners to work with by itself.
Here is the document we can work on:
Everybody is invited to contribute, I’ll try to do some work on it Monday/Tuesday.
This RFI is directed towards single companies, I’m not sure if consortium fits here. Also deadline is 1st October, so contacting all this organizations and doing everything on time would be very problematic.
Besides the informations we have to provide, that are mentioned in Google Document, we have to also provide them a pitch deck in form of presentation. I’ve started creating it (it is based on OpenMRS brochure, executive summary of the company, website and annual report). I think this could be later used for many different occasions:
I am gonna finish it tomorrow, but it would be great, if any one could share with me some OpenMRS pictures (from conferences etc.) so I could change them with stock pictures used now.
Of course any suggestions and comments are very welcome!
Hi Maciej,
I work at Partners In Health, we also submitted for this RFI, focusing on integrating mobile health tools with OpenMRS and MOH data systems like DHIS2. Last month we were informed that we would not be invited for further discussion. I am checking with others to see what feedback they received, to gauge what types of innovations the Foundation was interested to hear more about. Can you share any updates with the community? Thank you!
We’ve got message from them about two weeks ago (I am so sorry for not posting this earlier, but I was on the sick leave for last couple of days).
Dear OpenMRS team,
Thank you again for your submission in response to our RFI on tech-enabled PHC systems.
Through this RFI, we sought to better understand the landscape of innovation using technology to lower costs, increase access, and improve other important dimensions of primary care in low- and lower-middle-income countries. We ended up receiving more responses than we had expected and enjoyed reviewing each one in detail to learn about how innovators like you are leveraging technology to improve PHC.
Regrettably, given our current strategic interests and limited resources, we do not think that this is the right time to pursue further opportunities for engagement with you.
We thank you again for your response and we look forward to hearing how your innovation progresses in the future. It is heartening to see how much of the global community has been focusing on using technology to improve PHC.
Best regards,
Integrated Delivery team, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
I’ve send an email with request for feedback - if I get anything (usually this is problematic, but it is always worth a shot), I’ll post it here.
Do you have information about any organization/project, who did get the positive feedback for this RFI?
Thank you for sharing the response, that happens to be the exact same response we received. In talking with another NGO in the Community Health Impact Coalition network, they received the same response. We heard indirectly from the beginning that we should not get our hopes up and expect any direct funding coming out of it. It was phrased much like an RFP, so many organizations responded with great expectations, but our read on it was that they were searching to see what new ideas and approaches are on the horizon.
I hope that through this community we might start a discussion about future opportunities for partnership and collaboration between many NGOs and governments who use OpenMRS, and whether we can approach funding agencies in a broad coalition to harmonize and leverage all the great efforts in data systems and integration.
We are very interested in discussing future opportunities. OpenMRS started this year regular, bi-weekly meetings about fundraising. If you are interested, we would be very happy if you would join us to talk about this (next one is on 8th January).
I also see the need for partnerships and coalition around OpenMRS - I’ve talked with @jennifer about creating the list of contacts of people and organisations, that could potentially collaborate with OpenMRS. I hope that it could help us in creating better proposals and projects themselves. Also in some cases, partnerships are needed to even to qualify to participate in RFP (right now we are looking for potential European partners, besides SolDevelo, that could join us for trying for Horizon 2020 EU funds - if PIH or CHIC would be interested in that and have European partners, that is one of the things, that we could start on working together).
Hi Maciej and Jennifer,
Yes I’m interested in joining the next fund-raising meeting. I will also ask my colleagues to see if anyone else from PIH can join. I believe PIH does not have any partnerships with implementing NGOs in Europe, but we have a number of relationships with organizations through our participation in coalitions and multilateral partnerships in clinical areas like HIV, TB, NCDs, etc. Since I work on the M&E team and not the development/partnerships team, I am less aware of these European links, but I will ask internally. I have some ideas for contact persons for your list as well.