Planwise: Optimizing Geospatial 

Network Coverage Executive Summary What is Planwise? 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.  Millions of people use “big data” and complex optimization algorithms every day when they                           look up driving directions on their smartphone. Combining good design and fast algorithms can                           make an otherwise daunting task intuitive, transparent, and accessible. Planwise makes                     optimizing the coverage of a service network (e.g., health facilities or schools) as easy as                             getting driving directions on your phone. It can analyze and generate coverage or catchment                           maps for your program & then suggest the most impactful options to improve access or                             capacity. Planwise does this without needing external consultants, forcing users to difficult to                         use or proprietary datasets or hire a data scientist.  

● See a brief video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/eRbo7xTx_Xw 

  

Now, the Planwise community is seeking to mature, grow, and extend the community of                           

implementers for increased impact. Specifically, we are seeking to: 

1. Formalize and grow the community of implementers 

2. Create and deploy a strategy for replication and scaled impact 

3. Extend Planwise functionality to fill priority community-identified gaps 

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Planwise Project Description This concept note seeks to catalyze and respond to the current demand to mature the Planwise                               

community and solution. By providing free to use, powerful planning tools, to augment the                           

human insights to planners and managers, it is possible to achieve significant impact. The                           

Planwise solution to date has the core components available for completing this process.   

 

In communities around the world, significant proportions of the population live outside the                         

reach of critical, life-saving, health or other social services. Access to care is affected by the                               

demand for services being greater than their capacity or that the distance an individual must                             

travel is too far. Community and program leaders, planners, and managers are responsible for                           

increasing access to these services but must do so without understanding the current                         

geographic coverage area and how to optimize access to care efficiently. 

 

Planwise solves this challenge by taking three categories of data and bringing them together in                             

a coordinated way. The tool uses data on the current population, overlaying road and walking                             

time calculations, and lastly locations of service networks or the health system. Each of these                             

types of data is now available via open global services, see below for specific details. Together                               

these data sets combined with the industry-leading best practice algorithms, and optimization                       

techniques allow a ministry of health or NGO program manager to use Planwise to see three                               

critical pieces of analysis: 

✓ The current coverage of the health system and quantified current capacity. 

✓ Identify areas where coverage is missing; Or with an overloaded network. 

✓ Receive suggested scenarios for how to best enhance the service delivery network for                         

maximum impact. 

In the future, we also plan to include other modifiers on service demand, such as disease                               

epidemiology or the quality of services provided at a facility. This type of service is possible due                                 

to the existence of global services, including:  

1. WorldPop that provides an open-access archive of spatial demographic datasets for the                       

developing world.  

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2. Open Street Maps (OSM) that provides open road network data - while incomplete in                           

some places, it represents the best scalable service for this data. Initiatives such as                           

Missing Maps can also help to close these gaps for implementation partners.  

3. Google Earth Engine and the collaboration with the University of South Hampton have                         

recently made friction surface data accessible, to allow for walking time calculations.  

4. Any geospatial data set for a service network, including OpenHIE. Planwise allows for                         

CSV uploads, and in the future, we plan to support common formats/standards of                         

geospatial location data. 

The application of Planwise began with maternal and child health and laboratory planning, but                           

has expanded as more partners engage including more broadly: 

● Primary healthcare delivery, particularly for maternal and child health programs seeking                     

to deploy new facilities, upgrade facilities, add ambulances, mobile clinics 

● Laboratory or referral networks, where facilities collect a sample or interact with a                         

patient before further testing or treatment at a second location. 

● Staffing and training, to improve the capacity and quality of staff located within the                           

network of locations. 

● Village or site-level interventions, disaster response where a team sets up for a period                           

to offer emergency services or to support a public health campaign. 

● Radio tower placement and capacity for international development projects that                   

provide educational programming and behavior change content. 

● Water well and school placement to maximize impact for investments in access and                         

availability of critical services. 

Past design and implementation partners include Concern Worldwide and the African Society                       

of Laboratory Medicine (ALSM) - implementing in Niger, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Our partners plan                           

to scale-up of these activities in the next 6 months. Other key partners have been identified                               

across half a dozen other nonprofits and social impact organizations, and are working in many                             

countries across Africa and Asia. Planwise is already operational in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso,                         

Central Africa Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Philippines, Tanzania, Thailand,                     

and Uganda. Additional countries are actively being provided routinely through current program                       

activities. 

 

Open Source Repository: https://github.com/instedd/planwise via GPLv3 

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Technical Approach InSTEDD, working with existing partners, has already developed and deployed a working and                         

stable cloud-hosted instance of Planwise that is free to use. We want to build on this success                                 

to see Planwise implementations replicated and impact scaled. The following objectives are                       

required to achieve our impact goals:  

1. Formalize and grow the community of implementers 

2. Strategy for replication and scaled impact 

3. Extend Planwise functionality to fill priority community-identified gaps 

1: Formalize and Grow the Community of Implementers 

A grassroots network of Planwise implementers has emerged through InSTEDD’s leadership                     

and partner network. Our first objective for this project is to formalize this engagement and                             

create an open community and governance structure that collects and shares experience,                       

knowledge, as well as informs the future development of Planwise. This is critical to achieving                             

NGO-driven replication of Planwise use and to facilitate transparent collaboration among                     

partners. Activities include: 

 

Activity 1.1: Design and Document a Governance Model - First, we propose to design and                             

document, with key stakeholders, a governance model for the Planwise OSS solution that                         

makes it clear how groups can contribute or collaborate, protect intellectual property, and                         

prioritize the future development of Planwise. Protecting the intellectual property of experts is                         

essential, specifically for the data science associated with geospatial modeling and                     

optimization. The license for Planwise will continue to be open-source GPLv3.  

 

Activity 1.2: Setup Digital Community Resources and Infrastructure - We propose to set-up                         

online community tools and establish resources for Planwise implementers and partners. It                       

should be simple and straightforward for contributors or implementers to connect with the                         

community and learn the basics about how to use or contribute to Planwise.  

 

Activity 1.3: Operationalize and Run the Community - Operationalize and Run the Community                         

- Once the foundational pieces of an online community are in place, the task of operationalizing                               

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and managing the community can begin. This process necessitates a blend of providing routine                           

value to others, as well as fostering organic community participation. To more explicitly engage                           

implementers, we plan to document case studies from 3 implementers and empower them to                           

share their experiences through the community. 

 

Deliverables:  

✓ Published governance and community model for Planwise;  

✓ Operationalized community with participation from stakeholders using Planwise,  

✓ With online resources and infrastructure ready. (e.g., wiki, chat-forums, and calendar of                       

events) & Communication Tools - Simple website and onboarding materials 

✓ 3 Planwise implementer case-studies. 

 

2: Strategy for Replication and Scaled Impact 

We believe the Planwise solution is ready for scale and replication to any program looking to                               

make data-driven decisions for where investments are made to improve service. To achieve                         

this, we are seeking to create and implement a strategy for replication and scale. By designing                               

such a strategy or model with scale and replication in mind, our team is seeking to find a                                   

sustainable pathway to achieve replication and increased impact; in addition to being able to                           

maintain and extend Planwise functionality. Our experience from past open source initiatives is                         

that quality technology alone can’t achieve the type of impact we are seeking. That designing a                               

strong program, engaging the right partners and executing on the model is just as critical to                               

success. Activities include: 

 

Activity 2.1: Bootstrap Implementation Support for Key Impact Partners - New partners may                         

be interested in exploring the use of Planwise, but have difficulty facilitating it for existing                             

programs. We would like to help these partners bootstrap Planwise into their organizations. As                           

part of the program, we propose to seed fund 3-5 organizations to explore Planwise utilization                             

across their programs. Increasing the number of implementers are critical to many aspects of                           

this project, but also for this program to have a direct and measurable impact. 

 

Activity 2.2: Design and Test Models for Sustainability - Designing solutions that can have a                             

scaled impact require a focus on developing and testing models that facilitate replication. We                           

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do not anticipate a single funder supporting Planwise directly, so instead, we plan to create a                               

model of services and an associated program that helps partners easily replicate Planwise                         

implementation. While this makes it easier for partners to integrate Planwise into their                         

programs, it also helps to make Planwise more sustainable. We would also like to explore the                               

potential to identify other pathways for sustainability, such as private sector licensing.  

When our team has a first version of the model developed, we plan to test the model among                                   

partners; and using qualitative/quantitative analysis to evaluate what works and experimenting                     

as we go. Further, this includes seeking to formally collaborate with key actors such as                             

WorldPop and other geospatial communities of practice. 

 

Activity 2.3: Production of Support Materials - An organizations decision to begin using a                           

solution like Planwise, necessitates some degree of disruption of their status-quo; as Planwise                         

is genuinely a novel service that allows them to leapfrog several maturity steps. We would like                               

to develop a simple set of community materials that assist in the onboarding of implementation                             

partners and also helps them to quickly and independently begin using Planwise. Facilitating                         

easy use is critical, as Planwise often disrupts or is an entirely novel concept for some groups.                                 

We want to make it as easy as possible for groups to take advantage of Planwise. 

 

Activity 2.4: Mobilize a Publication / Scientific Literature Committee that reviews best                       

practice literature for geospatial modeling, creates a research plan with                   

implementers/universities, develops abstracts and publications that are then submitting to                   

journals and presented at conferences. Participation by researchers is critical as Planwise can                         

both contribute to, and benefit from a rapidly changing landscape of geospatial analytics and                           

other data science techniques. By fostering a group of researchers who can grow the                           

knowledge base, the quality of Planwise will results will improve, and we will attract more                             

research-minded users. 

 

Deliverables:  

✓ 3-5 organizations using Planwise 

✓ A tested model to support replication and scalability 

✓ User support materials, to help users independently solve their issues and use the tool.  

✓ Research committee, working towards publications with partner researchers and                 

associated implementers 

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3: Extend Planwise Functionality to Fill Community-identified Gaps 

As is the case with most open-source software projects; there are usability, interoperability, and                           

critical aspects of functionality where dedicated investment could help foster additional scale                       

and grow the community of implementers by removing barriers to their use. Any investment or                             

enhancements made to the solution will use the roadmap created by implementers. This                         

feedback loop is critical because we want to ensure that Planwise maps to implementers                           

needs, and is reactive to users. Also, as we begin new collaborations, we will learn more about                                 

how Planwise should work, and being able to have the flexibility to respond to those findings                               

will be vital to staying relevant. Activities for this objective include:  

 

Activity 3.1: Load additional country metadata for 50 countries (e.g., roads, friction surfaces,                         

& population). We currently have 10 countries loaded as of September 2018 and expect to                             

have approximately 15-20 by December 2018 - all of which have been funded by current                             

implementers. Any implementer can use loaded metadata once it has been loaded for a country,                             

amortizing the investment. This is key so that countries can easily begin using Planwise in their                               

priority countries that are not currently covered.   

 

Activity 3.2: Enable additional planning scenarios and functionality - Planwise supports two                       

forms of planning right now; 1) Referral scenarios (e.g., lab tests or transport for services) and                               

2) direct service access. There are other types of planning scenarios and dimensions of                           

planning we have already identified from partners that would be useful to provide                         

straightforward templates for Planwise use (e.g., Outbreak preparedness/response, capacity                 

building, malaria eradication, etc.). We would like to work with implementers to document their                           

needs and collaboratively create a roadmap for enhancing Planwise. This will increase                       

participation by partners, and build in a feedback loop to respond to users critical needs.  

 

Activity 3.3: Ensure interoperability with partner systems by implementing standards that are                       

common in the health and geospatial data domain. Typical standards include ones such as                           

FHIR, mCSD, or other geospatial-based standards such as those supported by the Open                         

Geospatial Community. Interoperability with services like DHIS2 or Healthsites.io is a priority.                       

Planwise does support integrations with facility registry applications currently as well as                       

providing a simple CSV import functionality as well for service location data. Making Planwise                           

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interoperable with common standards will help increase partners ability to import their service                         

networks. 

 

Activity 3.4: Interfaces to enable fine tuning and experiments by GIS experts. By enabling                           

Planwise to act as a hub for research and improving geospatial optimization and planning                           

techniques; not only with implementers and the platform be enhanced, but the state of                           

knowledge around geospatial modeling. Also, this functionality will target supporting the                     

consultants and experts who often carry out these types of activities manually. Planwise can                           

then act as a tool that enables experts to go further in their analysis and recommendations,                               

focusing on more sophisticated issues and research questions. 

 

Deliverables:  

✓ 50 new countries with loaded metadata; where implementation will now be possible.  

✓ Community-generated roadmap of enhancements; to support user prioritized               

functionality and planning scenario project templates. 

✓ Enhanced Planwise deployed and shared as open source software (GPLv3) 

✓ Interoperability with OpenHIE / geospatial information systems. 

✓ GIS expert interface in Planwise, to enable research and customization of modeling                       

algorithms.  

 

Consortium Team InSTEDD is a non-profit, human-centered design, and software development organization                   

based in California, with innovation labs (iLabs) located in Southeast Asia and Latin America.                           

InSTEDD has been working in the health and development space for the last decade,                           

developing high quality, scalable, open source digital solutions. InSTEDD is committed to HCD,                         

agile development, capacity building, open source, and ensuring that partners have more                       

significant degrees of positive impact with technology. InSTEDD was founded in 2006.   

 

Examples of related work include:  

● Africa Laboratory Mapping Project, with ASLM. Seeking to map and improve laboratory                       

networks across the continent.  

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● Founding member and community lead for OpenHIE - focusing on facility registries and                         

geospatial services and interoperability. 

● Cepheid GeneXpert remote telemetry and connectivity solution for diagnostic tests. 

 

We plan to manage the development and community efforts centrally from the InSTEDD team. 

Our team will engage stakeholders with concrete implementations, who are currently, or 

planning to, use Planwise. Core to our team are:  

● Scott Teesdale: Program Lead and Design Researcher 

● Nico di Tada: Architect and Director of Platform Engineering  

● Backed up by the InSTEDD platform, iLab and other core team members as needed. 

 

Other groups who are key stakeholders include the following implementers that are interested                         

in implementing Planwise for their programs: 

  

● Catholic Relief Services to integrate Planwise across their programs and improve the                       

quality of service delivery, particularly related to walking times to healthcare focusing on                         

program work Sub-Saharan Africa. 

● Equal Access is exploring the applicability of Planwise to measure the impact of health                           

programs transmitted via FM & AM radio and optimize their reach by calculating and                           

optimizing locations and characteristics of transmitters. Many of these programs are                     

located in the Sahel region of Africa and the Middle-east / Asia. 

● ASLM: Working on a funded program that is implementing Planwise in 2018 for                         

diagnostic device placement and sample referral optimization in 12 countries - Niger,                       

Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Congo, Brazzaville, Cameroon, CAR, DRC, Gabon,                 

Chad, & Sao Tome 

● Concern Worldwide was the first implementer of Planwise for Maternal Child Health,                       

and their collaborators and funders (including the Xerox Foundation, and with special                       

acknowledgment of Kelly Roberson who first pioneered with InSTEDD the work on                       

productizing, at scale, the mathematical models validated in Kilifi, Kenya). Concern now                       

focuses programs on the most challenging humanitarian environments. 

● Tupaia is an HMIS system being deployed in the Asia-Pacific region and are interested                           

in using Planwise for both planning and disaster response purposes.  

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● UCSF and Akros are implementing malaria control programs, and are interested in                       

using Planwise to improve malaria eradication programs. 

● PCI-India: To improve and maximize the impact of their vaccination and infectious                       

disease work in Bihar, India.  

 

Technical collaborators include:  

● WorldPop, the open population and movement dataset effort that provides open access                       

archive of spatial demographic datasets as a data commons, maintained by the                       

University of Southampton. Additionally, Southampton researchers and grant writers                 

are exploring further implementations of Planwise. 

● OpenStreetMap as a provider of road networks and in some cases drive time data. 

● Google Earth Engine as a source of elevation data, and as a close ally of Planwise that                                 

has worked with the University of Oxford to create unique data derivatives and friction                           

surface maps corresponding to walking times, which Planwise can help operationalize                     

in the field.  

 

We plan to continue to grow the list of interested stakeholders and invite them into the 

community of users. 

 

Digital Health Technologies Planwise is its own stand-alone open source software solution, that is hosted free to use in the                                 

cloud. Partners who wish to deploy their own local version are free to do this, although we                                 

don’t recommend this unless the hosting infrastructure is proven and ready. Further, geospatial                         

data on service location doesn’t have any of the typical limitations of medical records that have                               

PII, so there are many financial and logistical benefits of using the cloud.  

 

Work Plan, Project Deliverables & Timeline The work plan for the Planwise concept can be found here: Link to spreadsheet 

 

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Community Feedback & Ecosystem Planwise organically attracted a living ecosystem of public and private sector data providers,                         

algorithm experts, and country implementers, connected by common interest rather than by                       

MOUs and competitive contracts.  

 

Planwise commits to act as a genuinely open initiative allowing for a multitude of partners and                               

collaborators to engage and not driven by a single consortium or set of partners. To grow the                                 

community organically, we plan to focus on empowering groups and providing value, which                         

aligns with the community by supporting their goals.  

Specifically, we will: 

● Hold routine (monthly) web-based community meetings where participants can share                   

best practices, case studies, challenges, explore collaborations, and share updates.  

● Conduct surveys and polls to gather feedback on community meetings, Planwise                     

enhancements, guidance needs, and support material requirements, etc. 

● Create and maintain an open digital repository of guidance, likely a wiki or simple                           

website, to share information and details. 

● Provide a simple mechanism to share and review concepts or proposals, and find                         

collaborators. 

● Depending on community preferences, we may also create a chatroom environment                     

(e.g., slack) or google groups for asynchronous communication.  

● Engage other communities such as OpenHIE 

 

Planwise is a powerful example of how catalyst funds could both support current                         

implementation and accelerate the growth of a network and technology that has the vision of                             

being self-sustainable in the long run. Thank you for considering our concept, let us know if you                                 

have any questions. 

 

Scenarios ● Maternal and Child Health  

● Disease Surveillance and outbreak response 

● Laboratory management and referral pathways 

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● Radio Towers 

● Water points 

● Schools 

● Primary Healthcare  

 

Use Cases Use cases for Planwise, include: 

● A program manager or planner uses Planwise to load their list of sites and review the                               

coverage or catchment of the network, by their preferred mode of transportation (e.g.,                         

walking, driving, etc.) and the preferred amount of time.  

● A program manager or planner uses Planwise to identify areas that are outside of the                             

current catchment area; to find locations to send mobile clinics or send community                         

health workers. 

● A program manager or planner uses the catchment calculations in Planwise to find the                           

best locations to enhance or grow the network of locations. These improvements may                         

be through new locations or upgrading existing locations. The best options being the                         

cheapest ones, that would help the most people.  

● A program manager or planner takes the findings from Planwise, and can easily                         

customize recommendation scenarios based on his/her contextual knowledge. The tool                   

then recalculates the findings. 

 

User Stories User stories for Planwise, include:  

● As a program manager, I am preparing to deploy an intervention, and I would like to                               

know where to select my intervention site(s), to reduce walking times for those who are                             

most vulnerable. 

● As a public health manager, I want to understand the exact catchment of who can                             

access a service my program is providing - via both driving and walking times.  

● As a program manager, when I am designing an intervention; I want to form a strategy,                               

with specific coverage targets, to achieve my proposed goals. 

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● As a laboratory manager, I want to understand the gaps and bottlenecks in sample or                             

patient referrals, so I can increase capacity or adapt referral patterns to maximize                         

efficiency and decrease the time required to have a test result delivered to a patient or                               

provider. 

● As an analyst, I want to identify communities that have limited or no access to a service,                                 

to better articulate risk for poor health outcomes, outbreaks of disease, etc. 

● As a program manager, I want to compare different scenarios for how best to increase                             

the scope or capacity of the health system, so that I can make an informed decision                               

about the approach we will take - such as to add more ambulances, build new facilities,                               

increase capacity at existing facilities, send mobile clinics, etc... 

● As a GIS analyst, I want to pull the base layers of demand and capacity data into                                 

another GIS or data visualization platform, to quickly create custom reports and create                         

compelling stories of impact and continuing need.  

● As a funder/fundraiser, I want to know how much our network or system needs to grow                               

to support X% of the population so that I can pursue the right amount of funding or                                 

advocate for universal access to care. 

 

Planwise Global Good Maturity Model The self-assessment of the global good maturity model for Planwise can be found here:  

● Link 

Proposal Summary What is Planwise? 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. 

 

What is our proposal? Our proposal seeks to create an open community of implementers and a                               

process to scale the use and impact of Planwise for healthcare and other social-impact related                             

programs. Specifically, we are seeking to: 

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1. Formalize and grow the community of implementers 

2. Create and deploy a strategy for replication and scaled impact 

3. Extend Planwise functionality to fill priority community-identified gaps 

 

Digital Health Atlas Link http://digitalhealthatlas.org/project/USa3b38330 

Tags Human Centered Design, Open Data, Open Source, Planning, Optimization, Catchment                   

Analysis, Access to Care, Service Delivery Coverage, Efficiency, Cost Effectiveness, Geographic                     

Accessibility, Demand for Services, Population Information, Census, Interoperability, Emergency                 

Response, Facility Registry, Health Finance, Human Resources, Public Health and Disease                     

Surveillance, Laboratory and Diagnostics Information System, Logistics Management               

Information System 

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