We have the goal of increasing transparency to enable good governance and fight corruption in the public health sector, exercising the right to information by granting access, through the development of a digital platform showing in a simple and accessible way the public contracting and procurement processes related to the supply of medicines and medical supplies in Mexico. At the same time, this information will allow research into possible cases of corruption and inefficiency and prevent its occurrence in the future.

We seek to improve the relationship between government and civil society by providing strategic information about public procurement procedures, including the purchase of products and the rental or contracting of services associated with the sector in Mexico. The objective is that citizens can access the information, process it and use it to guide it to action.

We considered that the presentation of this information will favor better bidding processes, with greater openness, rewarding meritocracy and avoiding direct awards; in turn, the social monitoring will increase in these matters, which will force those responsible to act with greater clarity, strategy and transparency.

The project will be divided into 6 phases:

We proposed to make detailed research on the contracting and public purchases of the health sector related to the supply of medicines and medical supplies since 2009 (a presidential term and a half before the current one). To facilitate the analysis, we propose to pass the information to the standardized Open Contracting Data Standard ( OCDS ) format, which will allow the use of resources that already exist to analyze this data, and will serve to scale the project in the future to other contexts. Also, the quality and clarity of each of these processes. In other words, we will identify if the content of the call and its results had adequate detail for competitors and if they could apply in full transparency; This will be systematized and compared through the creation of a "Transparency Index".

This research will be carried out throughout the national territory and will be updated with each new process, comparing between the federal entity, date of purchase, type of social security and the medications and health supplies involved.

 

Although the information should be easy to identify, it is not always easy to access, that is, the public existence of the information does not guarantee its understanding for the majority of the Mexican population, which, in turn, impacts the participation they may have in monitoring these projects, without needing to be experts in the subject.

We will develop graphic digital content, friendly for its use, that will allow comparisons and analysis to be made in a simple and accessible.

 

In this phase, the backend and frontend programming necessary to support the needs and objectives of the project will be developed. It must be friendly for its use, so it will be necessary to constantly analyze the user experience to improve it.

It is also important to safeguard the security of the software, since, given the type of information it cannot and should not be altered.

 

This phase is divided into three sections, initially a research team, which through the study of open data and the request for more information, will identify patterns of cases of corruption, irregularities, cost overruns, cases of inefficiency, among others and then refer them to the authorities.

In a second moment, the information will be concentrated in two index's, the transparency index - mentioned above - that will qualify the bids, and the Corruption Index, which will be estimated by analyzing the transparency information of the public contracts, considering different variables. It is an index that measures, on a scale of zero (high risk) to one hundred (low risk), the levels of risk of corruption in public procurement procedures in a given government.

As a precedent of these index´s, we have the "Karawa Monitor " in Chihuahua-Mexico, that monitors the purchase of public works and has impacted on the decrease in associated corruption.

Finally, we propose a type of analysis of proactive information. With these researches, we will provide inputs for the authorities to generate efficient public policies to solve the shortage problem. Many of them will allow us to see comparatively, if there are types of medicines with a higher price or if there are better options for the treatment. Also, it can be tracked if any medication reported with a shortage matches with the lack of purchase or with intermediate steps associated with the supply chain.

 

A 6-month communication strategy will be planned, mainly through digital media. We will advertise the platform; the benefits of its use and its associated findings. Within this strategy, we will invite researchers and journalists to use the platform.

Once the information is gathered and presented in a friendly manner, a public presentation will be made at a press conference, in which the main results will be shown. The platform will be optimized to be found by search engines so that when the name of the drug and the hospital is searched, the platform will appear in the first results aiming to become a recurring consultation page.

 

The Monitor will be scheduled for permanent updating with each bidding process. In the same way, the insights derived from the analysis of the user experience will be continuously reviewed, to favor the continuous use and accessibility of the platform.

The analysis of open data and big data will favor governance by promoting the co-participation of civil society and the government for the attention of public problems. It will allow us to identify cases of corruption, analyze its prevalence and even its impact, both on public spending.