First things first: openIMIS as an open source software is completely free of charge. You can simply download and use it. There are no license costs attached to it, no matter what the use case is.
However, there will be costs arising for implementation of openIMIS in your organization, depending on a variety of factors. Not all of them are mandatory, all of them will depend a lot on the specific setting in your organization. The following chapters list costing factors that can give you a guideline on how to estimate the implementation cost for your setting.
Attached to this page, you'll find a few spread-sheets with sample calculations, that you could use as a blueprint. Please be aware, though, that all figures in there are just rough estimations based on previous experiences and we cannot give any guarantee that your final bill will match the estimate.
Pre-implementation (Feasibility Study)
Objective
The objective of the pre-implementation phase is to get a good overview of the specific business processes of your scheme/organization and to act as a basis to plan the following phases.
Activities
The pre-implementation phase would consist of an openIMIS expert team, together with experts on the social health protection scheme, and local IT experts, going through each of the business processes in detail and comparing them with how openIMIS process flows. The team would use the results of the comparison to come up with detail requirements for customization and configuration of openIMIS to meet the needs of the scheme. Additionally, the team would also assess the current state of hardware in the implementation location, from the availability of servers for hosting to the hardware requirements at health facilities and communities, and recommend changes or addition to the hardware infrastructure. These recommendations, together with the detail requirements of customizations developed by this team can be used to create tender documents for new hardware and software customization.
Output
- A detailed assessment of social health protection scheme's business processes, including comparisons with openIMIS processes.
- A detailed assessment of hardware availability and gap analysis with openIMIS requirements.
- Recommendations on new hardware requirements.
- Detailed customization requirements (Requests for change in openIMIS Issue Queue), with cost estimates.
- Detailed configuration requirements.
- Roadmap for implementation, including pre-requisites.
Customization (Pilot-Implementation)
Objective
The customization of the pilot implementation will result in a testing environment that can be used by real users to verify the correct functioning of the openIMIS instance according to their needs.
Activities
During the custumisation phase a team of openIMIS implementers needs to collect specific master data from the specific domain and configure these into the openIMIS instance. Depending on the gap analysis from the requirements, missing functions might have to be added to the openIMIS core modules or maybe even added as new modules.
Output
- A customized version of the openIMIS master version, meeting all requirements of the social health protection scheme's business processes.
Testing/User acceptance
Objective
Verify the correct functioning of the openIMIS instance.
Activities
Output
- Confirmation that the customized version of the openIMIS master version (from the Customization step above) is fully functional as per the needs of the scheme.
Core staff of the scheme operator (social health protection & IT staff) are trained on openIMIS
Recommendation
The user acceptance training should be done simultaneously at different types of facilities (health posts, primary health centers, secondary hospitals, tertiary/referral hospitals) to ensure that the software meets the needs of all the users.