In April 2023 the government of Cameroon launched a Universal Health Coverage (UHC) scheme, integrating previously individual health financing programs into one. With this scheme the Ministry of Public Health in Cameroon is committed to ensuring some 25 million citizens have access to basic health services. Digitalisation was highlighted as one of the crucial factors to overcome fragmentation and the role and impact of openIMIS over time became visible - from streamlining data management to empowering communities with greater access.

Ghislain Guehoua Konga, an expert for Hospital Information System and clinical systems and Development Worker with GIZ, has been working closely with the MoPH and the openIMIS initiative over several years. Ghishain will briefly reflect on the history of openIMIS implementations in Cameroon (since 2013), share practical experiences and lessons learnt from the implementations, talk about the integration of the several schemes, interoperability aspects and suggest next steps.

Two articles on the Healthy DEvelopment platform provide background on developments in Cameroon:

• Thinking and working politically to realise Universal Health Coverage: Insights from Cameroonian-German cooperation – Healthy DEvelopments (bmz.de), Feb 2024

• openIMIS powers Cameroon's long-term vision for universal health coverage, Aug 2024

Co-ordinates

Date: 31.07.2024

Time: 10.00 AM Central European Time (CET)

Room: https://meet.jit.si/openIMISImplementers - (jitsi claims to support Chrome, Chromium & MS Edge and Firefox browsers only.  You might also want to try the jitsi app)

Participants: (kindly only add yourself, not others):

Schedule

Summary (by Corinne Grainger)

Cameroon was the topic for a lively and well-attended July Bhela Community call. The session kicked off with a presentation by Ghislain Guehoua, expert for Hospital Information System and clinical systems and Development Worker with GIZ. He reflected on the work on openIMIS in the context of the Digital Health & Social Protection Portfolio of the Cameroonian-German bilateral health programme, Pro-PASSaR II.

The openIMIS UHC platform in Cameroon brings together different health financing schemes by capitalising on the need to digitalise their common management processes – namely patient enrolment, claims management, payments, and monitoring and reporting. Cameroonian citizens are able to access a basket of services, comprising maternal and newborn health, tuberculosis, health services for children under five, haemodialysis and HIV care, while health facilities can issue a single invoice for the different services, which is much more efficient.

In a short space of time, Ghislain described a wide range of openIMIS implementations - past, present and planned, including innovative adaptations to support birth registration at health clinics, education cash transfers, and the removal of health service user fees for internally displaced people. The presentation finished with a SWOT analysis which led to a stimulating Q&A.

The discussion covered challenges for training on openIMIS in the context of high staff turnover, server performance and capacity, and the need for an interoperability platform such as openHIM to connect openIMIS with diverse programmes such as eCRVS, openLMIS, DHIS2 and others. Ghislain posed a final and interesting question of whether the necessary master lists (e.g., master patient index, master health facility list) and interoperability platform should be in place before introducing openIMIS which helps to avoid many costly adaptations, or whether a rapid, more agile ‘build, learn, customise’ approach – as they did in Cameroon – is better. As always, there are advantages and disadvantages to both sides and the choice is often dictated by the political context.

These and many other issues are explored in two articles on GIZ’s Health DEvelopments website: Thinking and working politically to realise Universal Health Coverage: Insights from Cameroonian-German cooperation (Feb 2024), and openIMIS powers Cameroon's long-term vision for universal health coverage (Aug 2024).