Planwise emerged from a pioneering collaboration between InSTEDD, Concern Worldwide, and Kelly Roberson, who had a vision to
productize and make it simple to use powerful geospatial service optimization techniques anywhere in the world. As the tool began to take
form, it quickly became apparent that there was a broad ecosystem and demand for calculating facility catchment and improving the coverage
and capacity of a health system or distribution network.
PlanWise has a simple but powerful design philosophy. You and millions of people use lots of “big data” and complex optimization algorithms
every day, by just looking up driving directions in an app. Good design and fast algorithms make an otherwise daunting task intuitive,
transparent and accessible. It’s so easy there’s no reason not to use it. Analogously, PlanWise makes it just as easy to analyze and generate
health resource coverage plans. It does it without needing GIS consultants, forcing users to have access to massive or exclusive datasets, or
understanding of algorithms, or doing expensive yet disposable one-time planning efforts. There is no good reason why province-level health
official anywhere - India, Ethiopia, Niger, Laos - shouldn’t have user-friendly tools for informed decision making.
PlanWise has rapidly coalesced a rich ecosystem of country implementers, private sector and open-source data providers, algorithmic experts,
design and technology experts that share this goal to democratize data-based plans, and have -or aspire to- contribute to a ‘commons’ that
everyone in the world can access.
PlanWise makes it so easy for non-experts to generate and validate plans to improve health coverage that it has inspired NGOs and private
sector members to extend its uses and contribute data.
Because bringing together all these disparate datasets, calculating plans, and implementing the results in-country required rigorous such crosssector
collaboration and careful design for diverse audiences, PlanWise emerged as a classic example of a commons where even the smallest
contribution to the community, software and implementation model “floats all boats”.
Many NGOs, funders and health working groups have been adding use of Planwise into their projects, in planned implementations, or
proposals, and a well-planned seed investment can be amortized and multiplied by the network.