For 15 years, Johnson & Johnson and International Health Partners (IHP) have worked together to facilitate the donation of essential products and medicines into some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, especially during times of crisis. Since the start of the partnership in 2006, over 14 million treatments have been donated by Johnson & Johnson via IHP, impacting more than 12 million people in 70 countries across the globe. The two organizations have partnered to support communities during floods in Pakistan, conflicts in Lebanon and Tunisia, famine in Somalia and Kenya, Hurricane Matthew in Haiti, and the Beirut port explosion in 2020.
Longstanding partnerships, such as that with IHP, are at the heart of Johnson & Johnson’s disaster relief efforts.
Building on this longstanding partnership, Johnson & Johnson recently collaborated with IHP to develop POWER (Product Offerings With Excellent Results), a new end-to-end unified global system for product donation and source of truth to track the impact of these donations.
Funded by the Johnson & Johnson Foundation, POWER enhances BOAZ, the successful product donations platform that IHP had already developed, to create an even more streamlined product donations process that can be used by all of Johnson & Johnson’s and IHP’s product donations partners. As the foundation system underpinning POWER, BOAZ recently received a Charity Times Award for Best Use of Technology in recognition of the system’s remarkable potential to transform disaster relief response and the wider product donation field.
Creating a Unified Product Donation System
Ensuring everyone has equitable access to health—and particularly people in vulnerable communities and those living in conflict and disaster-hit zones—is a guiding principle for Johnson & Johnson. Throughout its more than 130-year history, the company has been on the forefront supporting local and global communities in times of tragedy, from natural disasters like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to humanitarian crises, like the current conflict in Ukraine.
Rapid and effective disaster response requires strategic partnerships with organizations working urgently on the ground under emergency and often dangerous circumstances. These partner relationships are built on trust and mutual respect, and developed over time rather than in the midst of a crisis.
“Longstanding partnerships, such as that with IHP, are at the heart of Johnson & Johnson’s disaster relief efforts,” says Kim Keller, Disaster Response, Resilience and Product Donations Lead, Johnson & Johnson. “As disasters become more frequent and catastrophic, it becomes ever more important to return a community and its health programming to their pre-disaster baseline as quickly as possible. Our goal is to globalize the system in support of all Johnson & Johnson companies and partners as a means of formalizing and strengthening those partnerships, maximizing POWER’s impact, and channeling the best possible support to communities on the ground.”
A History of Sharing Expertise to Further Mutual Goals
As part of a long-term commitment to collaboration and creating healthy communities across the globe, Johnson & Johnson’s Global Community Impact organization works with partners to offer employee engagement opportunities and share expertise. Programs include skills-based opportunities and secondments, as well as quarterly giving drives and hands-on volunteering.
In 2016, Mark Repath, Head of Customer Services at Janssen EMEA, volunteered for six months with IHP as a Talent for Good secondee to support the streamlining of product donations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Realizing that billions of dollars’ worth of product was being wasted across the region because of confusion around differing guidelines and regulations, Repath and the IHP team collaborated to create an aligned process that could be utilized not just by Johnson & Johnson but also by IHP’s other corporate partners. This process laid the groundwork for the system that would later become POWER.
Work began on POWER in 2018, with the development phase led by Super Being Labs, a social innovation agency creating social impact with entrepreneurship, creativity and technology. The POWER system is now in its third phase of implementation; having been in use for 18 months, it is being rolled out across the globe, while being tweaked and updated in order to maximize operational efficiency. The ultimate goal is for Johnson & Johnson to have one product donation process, globally.
An Award-Winning System Changing Lives on the Ground
The POWER system is already having a notable positive impact across Johnson & Johnson, IHP and the communities they are working to support.
By offering increased visibility and alignment across teams, as well as a streamlined, automated approvals system, POWER is facilitating the donation of more products across geographies. Once Johnson & Johnson’s strategic non-profit partners have undergone compliance checks, they are on-boarded to the system to increase the ease of donation.
The POWER system has also improved accountability by making the end-to-end donation process more transparent and enabling the relevant teams to report more accurately on the impact products are having on the ground. In addition to making disaster relief response faster and more efficient, POWER has been designed to provide support across the entire product donation process, such as improving access to medicines for local clinic networks in regions including the U.S.
“POWER is the culmination of a 15-year partnership that has seen IHP and Johnson & Johnson reach more people together,” says Adele Paterson, CEO, IHP. “The POWER system harnesses best practice and scale and, when fully realized, will result in even greater impact for the communities that we both serve.”
CP-356339
November 2022