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NEWS

openIMIS Newsletter April 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc throughout the world, we all realize the importance of and the need for resilient health systems. Countries have to maintain strong health systems that respond to the direct effects of the corona virus and ensure equal access to healthcare for all. Through health system strengthening, countries can sustain such access to healthcare even beyond the direct effects of COVID-19. In a joint statement the Social Protection Inter-Agency Cooperation Board (SPIAC-B) pointed to the risks of inadequate social protection coverage for the most vulnerable. The development of adequate social health protection and health financing schemes are especially important for vulnerable groups. If available, they will mitigate the financial barriers to healthcare, thus reducing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Our experience shows that the success of different health financing models in LMICs depends highly on the efficiency achieved in the implementation and the lean management of the business processes. Digitising the processes is a great way to increase efficiency but has historically been expensive. At the openIMIS Initiative, we would like to remove the burden of these high costs and instead offer a mature, scalable open-source solution for health financing as a digital global good. This solution is backed by a vibrant community of practice, involving software developers, implementing partners, promotors, capacity building experts and end users of openIMIS on a local as well as global level. We are confident this enables countries to design efficient health systems, provide more and better services, and extend their coverage to the population that requires it the most.

 

openIMIS Trainings

We are very happy to announce that from April 22, 2020 onwards we will offer structured training sessions on the openIMIS product. These virtual trainings consist of multiple one hour-long sessions focused on different aspects of openIMIS. The training sessions will be recorded and available together with other resources on our wiki. Details of the upcoming sessions are presented below:

Module 1: Introduction to openIMIS
This module starts with a brief overview of various health financing mechanisms currently being used and showcases features of openIMIS that can be used to adapt them. The module is split into four 1-hour long sessions that take place in April and May.

 

Please click here to register for the training sessions.

 

  • Session 1: Introduction to health financing mechanisms and insurance processes (April 22; 13.00 UTC)
  • Session 2: openIMIS system characteristics and data captured (April 29; 13.00 UTC)
  • Session 3: Running demos to showcase processes and features (Part 1- Registers) (May 6; 13.00 UTC)
  • Session 4: Running demos to showcase processes and features (Part 2 - Processes) (May 13; 13.00 UTC)

Please feel free to forward this information on the trainings to other interested colleagues.

 

 

Further Information

For further information about openIMIS as well as the role of social protection in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic please take a look at the following sources: