Bild
News Hero Image

Newsletter October 2021

The community connect engaged the openIMIS community and partners in discussions on a wide range of topics – from the social protection convergence initiative, to formal sector related requirements to a management information system, indicators on an openIMIS implementation for social protection schemes and marketing measures around the upcoming openIMIS introductory e-learning course.  

The social protection convergence initiative, was introduced by Anita Mittal and Dominique Leska (GIZ) as a joint effort by USP2030 members and non-members, governments, development partners and private sector towards creating a harmonised and interoperable digital ecosystem for social protection. The openIMIS community and partners were invited to contribute with their experience to support and shape the initiatives’ actions. Under the convergence initiative working groups had been defined on principles, process standards, data standards and technology standards. Interested experts and organisations can get in touch with the secretariat of the initiative via email or directly engage in a forum.  

In another session ILO shared experiences on requirements from a management information system to manage formal sector social insurance programmes. Starting of from the matrix of social security business processes by the International Social Security Association (ISSA), Ann Baeten and Rodrigo Asumpcao (ILO) reflected on the key elements of social insurance schemes in terms of business processes, data to be captured, data flows and the intricacies involved in e.g. managing payroll data in this context.  

With the number of openIMIS implementations in diverse countries and use cases increasing Jean Brice Tetka (openIMIS Coordination Desk) gave the impulse to look at existing frameworks for monitoring and evaluation in health (health dimension of social protection), digital health, technology application and health technology and the indicators they suggest. This kicked-off a brainstorming on additionally relevant frameworks and how their indicators would be relevant for monitoring, evaluation and eventually learning on openIMIS implementations of social protection schemes.   

To support learning on openIMIS, specifically via the upcoming openIMIS introductory e-learning course, in the final session the community collected ideas on marketing channels and activities to promote the course.   

Presentations and other materials are documented on the community connect wiki page. 

 

The OpenHIE Conference on openIMIS

openIMIS contributed to two sessions of the openHIE conference 2021. One session covered the new GovStack Initiative and the other one the new openIMIS AI module. Long-time followers of the openIMIS initiative will know OpenHIE as the technology framework based on Digital Public Goods, that openIMIS actively supports for an integrated eHealth systems approach.

 

openHIE and the GovStack Initiative 

The session on the Govstack Initiative took place on Wednesday, 6th October 2021, and introduced the two communities of OpenHIE and GovStack to each other. The session, which was moderated by Hani Eskandar from ITU in Geneva, highlighted the main goal of this relatively new initiative as the acceleration of digital transformation of government services. The GovStack Initiative which is a joint effort of the ITU, GIZ, dial, BMZ and Republic of Estonia Ministry of Foreign Affairs envisions that in five years they can empower all governments to build more effective and cost-efficient digital services based on certified standards.  

A dialogue was initiated among the participants on how best to leverage synergies. At the example of openIMIS, it was discussed how existing Digital Public Goods from the OpenHIE ecosystem can be integrated into a GovStack architecture, thus profiting from an integrated and holistic ‘Whole of Government’ approach that ensures a trusted environment with certified security. 

 

The Session on AI as a global good 

This session introduced the openIMIS AI module for automated claims adjudication based on deep learning algorithms.    
The first step for an automation is a rule-based system for claim validation according to formal rules. Adding an AI can also highlight claims that “somehow look suspicious” according to trained evaluation patterns from historical manual evaluation results. The human claims adjudicator now only reacts on claims that were flagged as being suspicious. The OpenHIE community engaged into a discussion on how AI modules can then be packaged as Digital Public Good, paying special attention to data confidentiality and AI bias.