openIMIS Newsletter March 2022

Wrapping up phase 1 in Niger

 As a further step towards universal health care coverage, Bluesquare started a project to implement openIMIS in Niger with funding from the Belgian Development Agency Enabel. The project successfully set up openIMIS for a health insurance scheme in two districts, Gaya and Gothèye. ´A first version of openIMIS necessary for adapting it to the Nigerien context has been uploaded (e.g. products, list of health facilities in districts, medical items and services, prices.). In addition, trainers were trained to teach other employees in the health sector about the functionalities of the open-source software.  As a follow up, Enabel and Bluesquare are waiting for the decision by Niger authorities to rollout openIMIS further on a national level. You will soon find detailed information on our website and our Wiki page. Stay tuned!

Listen to the latest episode of the  gdhub VOICES on openIMIS

Gdhub VOICES is the podcast of the Geneva Hub for Global Digital Health about global health solutions in health systems around the world.
In the latest episode Olivier Praz from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and Saurav Bhattarai from the OpenIMIS coordination desk share valuable insights from the last years and give us their take on how and why OpenIMIS will continue to increase its impact.
 
It is very worthwhile to listen to the podcast and get new exciting information about the openIMIS-Initative.  
 
Click here for listening: gdhub VOICES #5: openIMIS

First Toumaï community workshop- openIMIS for health insurance: a modular approach

The first Toumai Workshop 2022 took place on Tuesday, 15th of march. The webinar was the start of a webinar series to be held this year. The central topic was the modular approach of openIMIS. The modular approach has the particularity of allowing a simple update of each module or the creation of new modules without requiring an update of the entire software. It will allow easy development or updating of health insurance modules, easy maintenance, and easy integration with various other software.
 
The Toumaï community is the French speaking community of openIMIS; it organised its first workshop of the year on the topic “openIMIS for health insurance: a modular approach”. Several participants representing the private sector and public institutions, gained knowledge about the challenges in health insurance in relation to digitalisation, the new modular version, and its impact in insurance management. An article and a video of the workshop will be available soon.

The openIMIS Initiative Celebrates the International Women’s Day
 
The 8th of March marks the International Women's Day. A day that is very important for the OpenIMIS Initiative. It is not only on this day that we are reminded that we must always ensure gender-sensitive results in development cooperation. The openIMIS initiative believes in empowering women by enabling more and more to access health and social insurance with our implementations in Nepal and other countries.