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Newsletter March 2020

In these challenging times the openIMIS team wishes everyone around the globe good health and endurance! We are however glad to be able to provide you with some regularity and update you on the latest openIMIS activities.

 

openIMIS support for the Social Security Fund, Nepal 

The Social Security Fund (SSF), Nepal, has requested support for using openIMIS to manage their various health and employment injury schemes. Based on this request, University Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, and the DGUV (German statutory accident insurance), together with GIZ Nepal and the GIZ Sector Initiative Social Protection are supporting the SSF in the further development of openIMIS. They aim to match the work processes surrounding the employment injury scheme, including medical claims, but also on salary compensation.  

This is the first time a use of openIMIS is being extended beyond the health sector. We are very excited to learn from the experiences of this new implementation! 

 

openIMIS support for the management of free HIV services, Cameroon 

In April 2019, the Ministry of Public Health (MOH) of Cameroon announced the elimination of the HIV related user fees, which took effect in January 2020. With this decision, the MoH will need to develop mechanisms and processes to reimburse health facilities for expenditures incurred while delivering the HIV testing and treatment services to the population.  

We are delighted to announce that openIMIS will be used by the MOH as a tool to manage and facilitate these complex processes associated with identification of beneficiaries, tracking of service delivery, and reimbursement to health facilities. The tool will be initially piloted in the central region of Cameroon, and assessed for further scale up. 

The openIMIS initiative will be working together with The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to assisting MOH with the implementation of openIMIS. 

 

AeHIN Hours – openIMIS webinars 

In case you have missed some of AeHIN’s webinars in the past or you might want to re-watch a few, you are now able to find them in our wiki: bit.ly/openIMIS-webinars 

Several topics are covered in the webinars, from general introductions to openIMIS to developments and implementations. 

 

Training of Trainers (ToT) Workshop at San Beda College  

AeHIN has continued to grow the openIMIS Community of Practice in 2020. On February 22, they offered a third ToT Workshop, this time at the San Beda College of Medicine in the Philippines.

The ToT workshops allow not only to learn about Health Information Systems in general but also about openIMIS as a digital tool that is currently been used in different countries to manage health financing. More information can be found on AeHIN’s website

 

openIMIS at the Regional FHIR Workshop 2020  

In January, a workshop on FHIR took place in the Philippines, focusing on digital health implementations and the challenges of interoperability.  

The Standards and Interoperability Lab- Asia (SIL-Asia) was established to serve the interoperability needs of countries in the Asia Pacific region. Today, HL7-FHIR is the emerging standard in health data exchange and sharing. The workshop aimed at providing an overview of HL7-FHIR to digital health practitioners in the region and showing how HL7-FHIR as a standard can be implemented in national digital health programs (bit.ly/FHIR-regional-workshop). 

Saurav Bhattarai, adviser at the GIZ sector initiative social protection and coordinator of the openIMIS initiative presented on openIMIS and the mapping its data model’s with FHIR profiles. For more information and to access the presentations, please visit bit.ly/openIMIS-events

 

FHIR workshop 1