Access to medicines is typically an essential component of most health-related initiatives and usually accounts for a large portion of expenditures. Yet when expanding activities or developing new interventions, program managers often have to contend with a gap in key information on pharmaceutical requirements and costs, the lack of which may ultimately undercut their efforts. With reliable and accurate quantification of health commodity needs along with associated cost information, managers can advocate for funding, and plan and implement new or expanding initiatives more successfully. Quantimed, an electronic tool developed by the Rational Pharmaceutical Management (RPM) Plus Program, with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), helps managers fill this information gap.
Quantimed supports the calculation of the estimated total cost of medicines, medical supplies, laboratory supplies, and reagents needed to provide services for health programs. It uses one of three primary quantification methods—past consumption, morbidity (including scaling-up patterns), or proxy consumption—or any combination of these. With appropriate data, Quantimed can be applied to determine needs for a single health facility, a national program, or a group of geographic or administrative areas.
Quantifying needs for HIV/AIDS-related medicines and supplies is particularly challenging for rapidly expanding prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) and antiretroviral therapy (ART) programs that lack the data history needed to drive conventional model estimates. Quantimed's scaling-up function helps meet this challenge, facilitating calculation of pharmaceutical requirements and costs for expanding programs and allowing for comparisons of various scaling-up scenarios.
Functionality Quantimed performs a number of key calculations. The tool is designed to—
- Quantify requirements for pharmaceutical products (medicines, supplies, etc.) and calculate their estimated cost for short course treatments (e.g., ACTs for malaria) or long-term treatment for chronic conditions (e.g., antiretrovirals for HIV/AIDS)
- Develop caseload estimates for each type of service or intervention for a given target population using its three quantification methods
- Determine pharmaceutical requirements for new or expanding programs
- Compare the costs of alternative treatment regimens and pharmaceutical products
- Compare alternative expansion models, enabling the user to determine the possible extent and speed of scaling up a program with available resources
- Calculate the estimated total cost of medicines, medical supplies, laboratory supplies, and reagents needed to provide services for a given target population or for an estimated number of patients
- Calculate order quantity, based on the best estimate of requirements for each pharmaceutical, according to user-defined procurement and inventory factors
- Assist program managers in comparing prices from various local and international suppliers
- Provide cost estimates in local and international currencies and perform conversions between currencies
Features
Useful features of Quantimed include—
- Database format and ability to export results to Microsoft Excel
- Built-in, client-adaptable medicines and supplies list with median prices extracted from MSH's benchmark, regularly updated International Drug Price Indicator Guide
- User-friendly data entry aided by "look-up" tables and lists
- Set of standard data collection forms and reports
- Comprehensive user's guide in English and French
As of April 2007, over 240 personnel—representing a wide variety of public health positions, including accounting assistants, operations officers, pharmacists, and procurement and program managers from more than 75 organizations and 47 different countries—have been trained on quantification of pharmaceuticals for malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, and reproductive health using Quantimed.
These trainings have been launched under various programs and projects that MSH has been involved with, such as Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the RPM Plus Program, the Strategies for Enhancing Access to Medicines (SEAM) Program, and the Supply Chain Management System (SCMS) Project.
For more information about the Quantimed tool, please contact Quantimed@msh.org.
