NMS E-services nominated for NITA-U Excellence Awards

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | National Medical Stores (NMS), a government entity mandated to procure, store and distribute essential medicines to mainly public health facilities, has been nominated for NITA-U Excellence Awards.

They have been nominated under three categories, the E-Service of the Year Award (Health); E-Service of the Year (Human Development) and Agency of the Year Award.

NMS’ head of ICT, Stephen Kisuze was also nominated for the Chief of Information Officer (CIO) of the Year Award.

The adoption of modern technology in the past year has helped NMS to streamline its operations and deliver services seamlessly.

“NMS has developed an internal system where all our processes are digitized or are being digitized,” said Kisuze.

He added that, “ this has been able to happen with the help of government and development partners who come in to help us when we need financing.”

Government has been struggling with pilferage of drug supplies starting from the district level where third parties are involved in the distribution of drugs to health facilities especially in remote areas.

However, to mitigate theft and other loss of medicines along the supply chain, NMS is implementing NMS+, a system that is intended to digitize the entire supply chain process end to end in order to ensure effective tracking of government medicines to the final users.

Upon full operationalization of the system, NMS will have the capacity to trace the medical supplies to the final user (patients and other healthcare clients) through individual identification using the national identification number (NIN) that will be captured into the ERP system.

This will provide end user data that will then be reconciled with procurement and distribution data to ensure that there is no leakage in the supply chain.

It will also provide much needed information for better quantification of medicines and related health supplies.

Health facilities that receive drugs from NMS include Mulago National Referral Hospitals, National Research Institutes such as Uganda Blood Transfusion services and Uganda Heart Institute and Regional Referral Hospitals such as Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital.

Others include District General Hospitals which provide preventive, promotive, outpatient curative, maternity, inpatient, emergency, surgery and blood transfusion and laboratory services.

NMS also supplies drugs to Health centers II, III, IV.

This year’s awards commenced with the e-Government Masterclass and an e-Government Expo. The event will conclude with the e-Government Excellence Award and Gala that will be held on December 10, 202 to highlight the advancements in e-Government services in Uganda.

The main objective of the campaign is to share experiences with various government entities from across the country, who share a vision of innovative administration through the application of e-Government.

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To vote, use the link below: https://awards.nita.go.ug/vote