County governments can now order drugs through the Kenya Medical Supply Agency (Kemsa’s) online portal and have their supply within four working days, down from a month.

The portal is available free of charge to Kemsa’s clients. All that the customer needs to do is to create a password which he can use from a personal computer, laptop or tablet.

The portal has a chat option through which clients can contact Kemsa staff for follow-ups on orders as well as to make enquiries.

Kemsa CEO John Munyu said the portal had eliminated the long manual ordering process which faced many challenges including taking weeks or months for Kemsa to receive order forms, under supply and over supply of commodities due to data inaccuracies in reporting and ordering and poor interpretation .

“We have significantly reduced our turnaround time from four weeks to approximately four days depending on orders, which has in turn seen an increase in demand from the counties by between 50 per cent and 60 per cent,” Dr Munyu told Business Daily in an interview.

The increase, Dr Munyu added, has also been aided by the fact that health services are now devolved which has given the county governments the leeway to prioritise their needs unlike before when the central government was the sole decision-maker on the kind of drugs and quantity it would send to respective health facilities across the country.

Other than reducing the time it takes to place an order and have the drugs dispatched, the portal has also reduced paperwork, error and costs. It has also improved national quantification and forecasting and lastly improved Kemsa’s data warehouse decision-making.

Dr Munyu says on average counties with larger populations such as Kakamega and Nakuru ask for drugs costing between Sh200 million and Sh300 million per quota.

Kemsa is targeting all the 47 counties with the portal, but only Makueni which has 160 facilities, Kajiado County which has 101 facilities and the Nakuru County Referral Hospital have fully embraced the new system.

Other than the county governments, the portal is also used by other Kemsa partners who include the National Aids and STIs Control Programme( NASCOP) for its National Programme for Anti-Retroviral. Others are Usaid, Unicef, Danish International Development Agency(Danida) and DFID among others.

“Before LMIS, orders from the facilities would be captured using the standard order and reporting forms (SORF), which would be done manually and sent to Kemsa via courier services. Most of the time we encountered inaccuracies in the quantities requested on the form and prolonged turnaround time,” Dr Munyu added.

How it works: Once the user has obtained his or her password and logged in, the customer is able to view the template and key in the quantities needed or prepare the order on a Kemsa excel ordering template and then upload it in the system.