Enhancing the offline mode of openIMIS through academic partnerships
The March 2026 Bhela showcased the work of Marvin Marqua, a digital health project manager and software engineer, who looked at the offline mode of openIMIS as part of his master’s thesis at the University of the Applied Sciences and Arts of North Western Switzerland.
His presentation formed part of an ongoing series on openIMIS’ partnerships with academic institutions. Opening the session, Uwe Wahser highlighted the mutual benefits of these collaborations for both the academic institutions and the long-term development of digital public goods such as openIMIS. These partnerships are also explored in more detail in a new Healthy Developments article.
Marvin Marqua’s thesis supervisor, Dragos Dobre, provided additional context for the technical side of his work, noting that – due to time and resource constraints – the offline mode had not been included during the earlier migration of the legacy version of openIMIS to the modular, open source architecture we know today.
Connectivity, however, remains a significant challenge in many parts of the world, limiting the effective functioning of digital social protection systems – often in countries where they are needed most. In the worst cases, this can mean patients being denied treatment if their eligibility cannot be verified online, and cash flow problems for health facilities when claims cannot be submitted for processing.
Marvin’s research addressed these challenges by looping at options for creating a reliable offline mode for openIMIS. Using the Software Architecture Comparison Analysis Method (SACAM), Marvin evaluated three digital architectures: Progressive Web Applications (PWA), Local-First architecture, and Desktop Application. The SACAM evaluation process uses six steps from Preparation, through Criteria Selection, Extraction Directives and Indicator Extraction, to Scoring and Summary.
As can be seen in the above slide, PWA ranked slightly higher. However, the differences were small, and all three architectures were found to be potentially viable, depending on the context and business goals for the integration.
Marvin then went on to explore the PWA approach in greater depth, assessing its potential benefits, limitations, and requirements for integration with openIMIS, and developing an openIMIS prototype which he demonstrated to Bhela participants.
While Marvin’s research focused on creating an offline mode for creating and processing claims and assessing the eligibility of insured patients, functionality could be extended in the future to support additional use cases, such as enrolment in remote or low-resource settings.
The proposed solution has been fully developed, but is not yet ‘production-ready’. Further updates will be shared with the community through the openIMIS newsletter, so please keep an eye out for this.
To find out more, visit our Wiki here or watch the full presentation here.