Content

1 Background
2 Objectives
3 Solution providers
4 Methodology
5 Outcomes

Background

Since it’s existence the openIMIS Initiative has been pre-actively seeking exchange with stakeholders in the field of finance and insurance for Universal Health coverage. As a result, the Initiative was also contacted by a number of other software developers, who build software to support scheme operators in low and middle income countries. Although several bi-lateral encounters were made, these relations remained in a casual state with little evidence for a further collaboration. The idea was born to get like minded developers at one table to brainstorm on potential synergies and develop ideas for a more substantial co-operations.

In June / July 2020 GIZ’s social protection global sector programme organized a series of meetings with various solution providers. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the workshops were organized as remote sessions and facilitated using a collaborative platforms for collaborative whiteboards (https://miro.com/app/) and videoconferencing (https://meet.jit.si/).

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

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	https://www.openimis.org/
BlueSquare / openRBF	21 countries in sub-Saharan Africa	Belgium	http://www.openrbf.org/
Carepay / PharmAccess	Nigeria, Kenya	Netherlands	https://www.carepay.com/
Healthix	Kenya	Kenya	https://healthixsolutions.com/#/
mTomady	Madagascar	Germany	https://www.mtomady.de/

Methodology

The group agreed to exchange on three virtual workshops:

Date	Agenda

Date	Agenda
23/06/2020	https://openimis.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OP/pages/1408958504	Introductions and scoping
10/07/2020	https://openimis.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OP/pages/1514274817	Busines Models, Systems Integration, Business Process Harmonisation
22/07/2020	https://openimis.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OP/pages/1556643889	Data Protection & GDPR, AI support

After each event the group discussed and voted on focus topics that would be covered in the following sessions, giving the team of moderators some days to prepare the sessions and identify speakers for lightning talks. The deep dive sessions were organized to include a quick (15-20min) presentation followed by Q&A and a co-working activity using the collaborative whiteboard (for example, identification of challenges and mitigations, or enumeration of APIs).

Date	Session	Co-working activities

Date	Session	Co-working activities
23/06/2020	Presentation of all solutions	Brainstorming and voting of topics
10/07/2020	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.
22/07/2020	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
	Consolidation	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 results of the sessions including slides and screenshots of the collaborative whiteboards can were documented in the openIMIS wiki for all 3 workshops:

Revisiting the objectives set above, here is our impression from the workshop:

Objective	Outcome

Objective	Outcome
to get the different solution providers to know each other	All organisations introduced themselves and their solutions. Partners started engaging in bi-lateral exchanges.
to understand the similarities, differences and skills of the different partners	Throughout the discussions, differences and commonalities in business models and approaches became clearer.
to find common areas for future collaboration	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
join the openHIE sub-community on health financing

openIMIS

2020-06 Finance & Insurance Services PartnerHack