Content:
Excerpt
First things first: openIMIS as 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 the implementation of openIMIS in your organization, depending on a variety of factors. Not all of them are mandatory, they will all depend a lot on the specifics of your organization and use-case. Read more here to estimate your specific implementation costs. Read more here to estimate additional implementation costs.
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
Objective
This phase of implementation would be focused on modifying the openIMIS master version to create a version of openIMIS that meets (all) the specific needs of your scheme/organization. The modifications are made based on the details provided as outputs of the pre-Implementation phase.
Activities
The major activities in the customization phase would be to modify the source code of the openIMIS master version to include all the additional functionality have been identified during the pre-implementation phase. The initial task before starting the modifications would be for the computer programmers to understand the functional requirements, and then begin modifying the code.
Output
A customized version of the openIMIS master version, meeting all requirements of the social health protection scheme's business processes.
Testing/User acceptance (Pilot-Implementation)
Objective
Verify the correct functioning of the customized openIMIS instance.
Activities
This phase would involve the deployment of the customized version of openIMIS in a controlled setting to verify that all the functionalities and work processes required by the scheme are present in the software. Following the initial setup of the software for use at select health facilities and scheme operator, various users would have to be trained on the tool itself. Beginning with the IT team responsible for managing the system, to users at various levels - health facilities, communities, would have to be trained on different aspects of the system. This training exercise will be a resource (time and funds) intensive. These trained users of openIMIS would be able to confirm that the customized version of openIMIS is according to the needs of the scheme.
Output
Core staff of the scheme operator (social health protection & IT staff) are trained on openIMIS
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.
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.
Roll-Out
Objective
The roll-out phase should be done only after all the features have been confirmed to be working (from the testing/user acceptance) phase. The primary objective of this phase is to fully deploy and use openIMIS to manage the processes in the social health insurance scheme.
Activities
The major activities of this phase would be deploying the software on a production-ready server (the specifications for the server would be available as an output of the pre-implementation phase), and to train all the users (scheme operator, health facility staff) on using openIMIS.
Output
A full rollout of openIMIS!