In june / july 2020 GIZ’s social protection global sector programme organize a series of meetings with various solution providers from the health financing space. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the workshops were organize as remote sessions and facilitated using a collaborative whiteboard platform (https://miro.com/app/).
Objectives
The objective of the sessions were
to get the different solution providers to know each other
to understand the similarities, differences and skills of the different partners
to find common areas for future collaboration
Solution providers
Solution provider | Active in | Based in | URL |
---|---|---|---|
openIMIS Developers and partners (Consortium led by GIZ, incl. BlueSquare, Possible Health, Digital Square) | Nepal, Tanzania, Cameroon, Tchad | Germany / Switzerland / Nepal / Belgium | |
BlueSquare / openRBF | 21 countries in sub-Saharan Africa | Belgium | |
Carepay / PharmAccess | Nigeria, Kenya | Netherlands | |
Healthix | Kenya | Kenya | |
mTomady | Madagascar | Germany |
Methodology
The meetings took care over 3 workshops, which covered the following sessions. The deep dive sessions were organized to include a quick (15-20min) presentation followed by Q&A and a group excercise using the collaborative whiteboard (for example, identification of challenges and mitigations, or enumeration of APIs).
Session | Group excercise |
---|---|
Presentation of all solutions | Brainstorming and voting of topics |
Open Source Business Models | Discussion: What examples are there out there of similar markets and tools that we can learn from? |
Data System Integration, HL7 / FHIR | Interoperability mapping, collecting integrations from different teams (which systems, what interfaces / protocol / standard) and sorting according to openHIE architecture |
Harmonization of processes of different health insurances | Process mapping, collecting which processes from the matrix are supported by which platform. |
Data confidentiality & Protection | Partners introduce their challenges and solutions |
AI & Fraud - Initiatives of the different partners | Roundtable - all partners present / explain projects involving AI & Machine Learning |
Evaluation and voting on future collaboration channels |
The workshops where moderated by an external consultant (Nils Kaiser) and the support for the Miro collaborative whiteboards was coordinated by the digital agency PPW.
Outcomes
The documentation including slides and results of the sessions on the collaborative whiteboards can be found for all 3 workshops:
Revisiting the objectives set above, here is our impression from the workshop:
Objective | Outcome |
---|---|
| All organisations introduced themselves and their solutions |
| Throughout the discussions, differences and commonalities in business models and approaches became clearer. |
| The discussion about open source business models and sustainability, as well as discussions on interoperability / FHIR and data privacy had a lot of engagement by all partners, thus indicating a common interest in further exploring these topics. |
Over the course of the workshops, additional objectives were achieved, for example to introduce partners to networks and initiatives previously unknown to them, for example openHIE and JLN.
The evaluations between sessions and of the workshop overall were almost all exclusively positive. Due to the participation decreasing towards the end of the 2nd workshop, the 3rd workshop was shortened to 2.5 hours in order not to collide with lunch times.
According to the evaluation, there is an overall interest from participants to stay in touch after the workshop series, with a preference for the following channels (in order of preference):
organizing remote meetings every 6 months
get together for an in-person hackathon in 2021