How Sri Lanka Digitalized Its Medical Supply Chain

Pharmaceuticals, lab items, and surgical supplies for Sri Lanka's public health system moved through thousands of institutions before SWASTHA — hospitals, clinics, and central stores — each managing stock on paper, with orders placed manually and no shared view of what was actually available where. A shortage at one facility was invisible to the people who could have redirected supply from another. Decision-makers found out about problems after they became patient-facing.

The brief: one platform, national scale

The Ministry of Health needed a single system for procurement, tracking, and issuing medical supplies across the entire public health system — not a dashboard bolted on top of the existing paper process, but a replacement for it, connecting clinical workflows at the prescription counter all the way back to central procurement decisions.

That meant the system had to work for two very different users at once: a pharmacist at a rural clinic checking whether a drug is in stock, and a Ministry planner deciding how to allocate limited supply across the island. Most systems are built for one of those users. SWASTHA had to be built for both.

What we built

SWASTHA — the Comprehensive Medical Supplies Management Information System — is a national platform covering the full supply chain: automated inventory tracking, order processing between institutions and central stores, prescription management at the point of care, and real-time availability data that's visible to decision-makers instead of buried in paper registers.

Getting there wasn't a single big-bang rollout. Institutions came online in phases, which let the team fix real operational problems — patchy connectivity at rural facilities, staff who had never used a digital inventory system, edge cases in how prescriptions map to stock — before they became a national-scale failure instead of a local one.

Where it stands today

• 2,900+ institutions connected island-wide, from central stores to individual prescription counters.
• 19,000+ daily active users, spanning pharmacists, clinicians, and supply chain staff.
• End-to-end visibility from procurement to distribution to prescribing — the first time the Ministry has had a real-time national view of drug availability.
• Running under a multi-year Loons Lab maintenance contract, not a one-off build that was handed over and forgotten.

What made it work

Three things, in our experience, separate SWASTHA from a project that would have quietly failed: it was rolled out in phases instead of everywhere at once; it was designed for the person at the prescription counter as seriously as for the person planning national procurement; and it's maintained continuously rather than treated as finished at go-live. A system this size never stops needing small fixes, new institution onboarding, and adjustments as clinical workflows evolve — the maintenance contract is what keeps it a living platform instead of a static one.

The result isn't just a bigger, faster version of the paper process it replaced. It's a fundamentally different capability: a health system that can see a shortage coming instead of discovering it after the fact.