AeHIN openIMIS CoP in Asia (2022 Activities)

AeHIN introduces openIMIS and the CoP in Asia at PMAC 2022

On January 23, 2022, AeHIN hosted a side meeting with the theme “Digital Health for UHC and Primary Care” at the virtual Prince Mahidol Award 2022. Over one hundred participants joined from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Japan, Cambodia, Australia, Myanmar, and the United States of America. Dr. Alvin Marcelo, Executive Director of AeHIN, introduced the openIMIS Community of Practice in Asia as part of their Mind the GAPS presentation. He also shared that academics and MOH members of the CoP talk about doing interoperability at the business layer manifested through the openIMIS platform.

openIMIS Webinar on the Health Equity Fund in Cambodia

On January 31, 2022, Ms. Suong Sovathana, Vice Chief of Payment Certification Bureau (PCA) in Cambodia, presented a webinar titled, ‘Health Equity Fund in Cambodia’ on AeHIN Hour. In this session, she shared an overview of the basic structure of the health system, health insurance schemes, health equity fund implementation, and claim reimbursement process in Cambodia. Ms. Sovathana also explained the role of the Payment Certification Agency in certifying invoices submitted by the health facilities to the Ministry of Health. This process is observed before reimbursements are made to facilities via bank -to-bank transfer.

The recording of the webinar is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0c0z3zJv7g

Ms. Sovathana Suong will be presenting her second webinar in April 2022.

openIMIS Webinar on a Study on Health Insurance Information Management in the Private Health Insurance Industry of Sri Lanka

Last February 22, Dr. Chamika Senanayake, lead of the openIMIS country hub in Sri Lanka, presented their study on health insurance in Sri Lanka. In the webinar, he presented their study which identified the life insurance and health insurance information management systems of Sri Lanka and their patterns of claims and utilization, evaluated the effects of health insurance data collection, processing, exchanging by use of conventional electronic-health insurance management systems, and explored the implications of data protection laws towards patient information safety while interacting with health insurance information systems.

The link to the recording will be made available once the paper of Dr. Chamika’s team has been published.

openIMIS Webinar - OpenIMIS: Case Study and its Implementation Status in Nepal

On March 8, two engineering students from the class of Dr. Rabindra namely Supriya Khadka and Rohan Chhetry presented their case study which includes the technicalities in which OpenIMIS was built. They talked about the implementation of OpenIMIS in Nepal, and how it can be implemented in the Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus, Tribhuvan University, Nepal.

Interesting information were shared by the students and opened opportunities for engagement with the students. The webinar recording may be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsKNRnNDcq4 .

openIMIS Webinar - Why and How Thailand became a SNOMED CT Member Country

Dr. Boonchai Kijsanayotin, Chair of the Asia eHealth Information Network, shared why and how Thailand became a SNOMED CT member country.

In the webinar, he shared what the Thai Health Information Standard Development Center (THIS) has learned, researched, pursued, and endured to introduce SNOMED CT to the health IT and digital health community in Thailand, and the plan to adopt and implement SNOMED CT in Thailand for both administrative information systems (Thai DRG and health insurance information system e.g., OpenIMIS) and clinical care information system.

View the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tP-ad2Lnl4

openIMIS Webinar - Social Protection Focusing on HEF Implementation in Cambodia

On April 5, 2022, Dr. Chhun Eang Ros, Deputy Director of the Payment Certification Agency (PCA) at the Ministry of Health Cambodia presented the specific roles of Patient Management and Registration System at relevant stakeholders at each level of Health Equity Fund Implementation, its process and coverage, and how it is being expanded nationwide.

The webinar recording may be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGJKt_9ZEL0

Open Source Health Information Systems: Opportunities and Challenges (Part 1)

In this session, Dr. Luis Ruiz talked about the aspects related to the design and development of open-source health IT infrastructures that guarantee the scalability and availability of data for health delivery, research, and policy making. Aspects such data ownership, data accessibility, and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles were covered. The webinar also focused on how these aspects should be approached at procurement and development stages from a free open-source software (FOSS) perspective.

To view the recording, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tR7WUjDx7Q .

The second part of the webinar will be held on May 13 at 3 PM Manila time.

DRG Webinar Series 2022

The webinar series aims at building up knowledge and learning experiences to participants from countries that want to pursue the universal health coverage policy with payment to acute inpatient care with diagnosis related group tools.

The core course materials target the whole range of stakeholders from policy levels to operational levels.

Sub-modules segmentally target individual groups from researchers and developers of the tools; hospitals; funders; and academic professional bodies such as health care accreditation assessors and medical associations and health IT association.

Webinar recordings:

April 13, 2022 - Module 1: The core understandings on DRG and health financing policy (DRG for ALL)
May 4, 2022 - Module 2: The story of the Thai DRG development
May 25, 2022 - Module 3: The mechanisms of DRG development
June 1, 2022 - Module 4: Hospitals in the DRG Environment
June 15, 2022 -To follow

openIMIS eLearning Course Launch

On May 6, the openIMIS eLearning Course was launched through a webinar.

In the first part of the session, Konstanze Lang provided a short introduction to the openIMIS initiative, the rationale behind, an overview on use cases and countries where openIMIS is implemented as well as on the community. It was followed by Daniella Majakari who gave the the introduction to the the new openIMIS e-Learning course, including the target audience, the learning objectives and different modules, and a short demo on how to navigate the course. A total of 60 participants joined the session.

To check the webinar recording, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jty7YXTX-C4

As of June 15, 2022, the openIMIS eLearning Course titled “Introduction to openIMIS” has 200 participants. Country hubs from the openIMIS Community of Practice in Asia have been organizing feedback and reflection sections based on their experience in completing the self-paced openIMIS eLearning course.

Current Status and Future Perspectives of OpenIMIS Implementation in Nepal

Dr. Rabindra Bista, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in Kathmandu University Nepal, gave a webinar on May 16, 2022.

In his presentation, he covered the current state-of-the-art of openIMIS implementation in Nepal, patients' perspectives of using openIMIS in Nepal, and how they can integrate openIMIS in an academic curriculum. Thirty-four attendees joined the webinar.

To view the recording, please visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2ZuTjsFLyE .

FOSS Webinars 2022

Dr. Luis Marco Ruiz, Chair of the openEHR Education Program, presented a two-part webinar about opportunities and challenges in Open Source Health Information Systems for governments and software implementers on April 8 and May 13. Forty-one attendees participated in the first webinar and 81 attendees joined the second webinar.

Both webinars covered aspects related to the design and development of open-source health IT infrastructures that guarantee the scalability and availability of data for health delivery, research, and policy making, as well as data ownership, data accessibility, and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. The webinar focused on how these aspects should be approached at procurement and development stages from a free open-source software (FOSS) perspective.

On June 10, Mr. Uwe Wahser from GIZ and Dr. Oliver Hummel from the University of Mannheim gave presentations on FOSS and Academia. Dr. Christoph Geiss, also from the University of Mannheim, joined the Q&A portion. A total of 24 participants attended the session.

Documentation and materials from the session may be accessed here.

Webinar recordings:

Open Source Health Information Systems: Opportunities and Challenges (for Governments)

Open Source Health Information Systems: Opportunities and Challenges (for Software Implementers)

FOSS and Academia: How to integrate openIMIS in your Curriculum

openIMIS Guest Lecture from Nepal

Mr. Nirmal Dhakal and Mr. Purushottam Sapkit gave a guest lecture to engineering students of the Institute of Engineering at Tribhuvan University on May 23, 2022. They gave a brief overview of openIMIS and Digital Health in Nepal. The students were mainly interested in status configuration, installation, as well as the existing countries implementing openIMIS and what they can learn from them.

openIMIS-DRG Datathon 2022

The Center for Applied Research and Development (CARD) of the Institute of Engineering at Tribhuvan University, in collaboration with the openIMIS initiative, Standards and Interoperability Lab Thailand (SIL-TH), and the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN), organized the openIMIS-DRG Datathon held on June 3-5.

A two-hour orientation was held on the first day of the datathon. Dragos Dobre and Eric Darchis gave an introduction to openIMIS and data models, and Dr. Boonchai Kijsanayotin, Chair of the Asia eHealth Information Network gave an introduction to DRGs and the Thai Data Model.

Thirteen out of the 14 participating teams successfully finished and submitted their output.

On June 6, virtual badges were awarded to the students via Badgr.

Images are by Center for Applied Research and Development (CARD), Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University. Retrieved from https://card.ioe.edu.np/datathon-orientation-session-jun-3rd-2022/, https://card.ioe.edu.np/datathon-award-ceremony-jul-4th-2022/.

openIMIS-DRG Datathon Awarding Ceremony 2022

On July 4, an awarding ceremony was held at Pulchowk Campus to recognize the students who won the openIMIS-DRG Datathon held from June 3 to 5, 2022.

The criteria used to score the performance and output of the groups were based on accuracy. The three winning teams namely Cartographers, Hufflepuff, and Trinity were awarded with certificates and prize money from the Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus, Tribhuvan University.

Prof. Sangeeta Singh, Director of CARD-IOE; Prof. Shashidhar Ram Joshi, Dean of IOE; and Dr. Basanta Joshi, Deputy Director of CARD-IOE were present in the awarding ceremony, while Dr. Alvin Marcelo, Executive Director of AeHIN, joined the awarding virtually via Zoom.

Prof. Basanta Joshi shared the results of the Datathon and Gaps Analysis in openIMIS and the Thai Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) through a webinar on July 18.

Resources:

openIMIS