Open space & bilateral talks - topic collection

1

Modernizing User Rights Management in openIMIS: Django Alignment, Affiliation-Based Permissions, and ClientUser Separation

Y-Note, SwissTPH;

Patrick Delcroix, Maxime Ngoe

This session will present a comprehensive proposal for overhauling the user rights and permissions architecture in openIMIS. Key elements include full alignment with Django's native permissions framework to leverage its mature, battle-tested security model and reduce custom code maintenance. We will detail the migration path for existing Business rights to a new 'affiliation'-based permissions model specifically tailored for roles such as PolicyHolderUser, EnrolmentOfficer, and ClaimAdministrator, enabling more granular, context-aware access that reflects real-world organizational affiliations. A cornerstone of this initiative is the introduction of a dedicated clientUser role with strict data isolation rules, guaranteeing that individual clients and their family members can only view and interact with their own records—significantly strengthening privacy compliance and user trust. Participants will explore implementation roadmaps, potential impacts on existing workflows and APIs, lessons from pilot migrations, and opportunities for community-driven refinement. This work directly advances openIMIS's evolution toward a more secure, scalable, and client-centric platform while extracting valuable lessons from a decade of production use.

Day 3, Open Space - Break-out sessions, tbc (based on voting!)

2

Introducing Program and Benefit Plan Concepts: Building an Agnostic Framework for Risk Pooling, Benefit Coverage, and Entitlements

Swiss TPH, …. expert for cash transfer;

Patrick Delcroix

This session addresses a growing risk in the openIMIS ecosystem: the rapid addition of new features without a shared, strategic, and truly agnostic conceptual foundation. Several development streams are introducing overlapping or conflicting notions of benefits, entitlements, and eligibility, which will create significant technical debt and make future evolution increasingly painful. The goal of this session is therefore not to present a finished design, but to collectively define a clean, layered conceptual model for benefit management that the entire community can rally around.
We propose two foundational levels: (1) a Pooling layer that handles money and risk aggregation across schemes and funding sources in a fully agnostic way, and (2) a Benefit Package layer that defines what a person is entitled to receive—modeled through options, conditional benefits, rights, and coverage rules that remain independent of any specific scheme or program. Transversally, we will tackle the critical enrolment matching problem: how to cleanly separate and relate targeted populations, potential beneficiaries, and actual beneficiaries so that the same framework works seamlessly for health insurance, cash transfers, pensions, and other social protection instruments.
By taking the time now to agree on these core abstractions, we can avoid the accumulation of ad-hoc shortcuts that threaten long-term maintainability. Participants will engage in structured conceptual modeling exercises, review real-world pain points from current implementations, and co-create a reference model that can guide both immediate feature development and the broader roadmap. This discussion is essential to protect the sustainability and scalability of openIMIS for the next decade.

Day 3, Open Space - Break-out sessions, tbc (based on voting!)

*potential co-facilitator: WB (tbc)

3

Legacy Model Migrations: Transitioning to Type 2 Database Tables for Robust Historical Data Integrity

Swiss TPH;

Dragos Dobre

After ten years of continuous operation across multiple countries and millions of beneficiaries, openIMIS must confront accumulated technical debt in its core data model. This session focuses on the systematic migration of selected legacy entities to 'type 2' slowly-changing-dimension tables. This approach preserves complete historical snapshots of records (e.g., policy versions, claim states, enrollee attributes) without costly duplication or loss of audit trails. We will present the candidate tables identified for migration, the automated migration scripts and data validation framework, zero-downtime deployment strategies, and the expected positive impact on reporting accuracy, analytics, and regulatory compliance. Participants are invited to share pain points from their own implementations, review the proposed change impact matrix, and contribute to prioritization and testing protocols. By confronting these legacy challenges together, we honor the community's decade of impact while laying a cleaner foundation for the next decade of innovation and scale.

Day 3, Open Space - Break-out sessions, tbc (based on voting!)

4

openIMIS as an Enabler for Small Private Insurance Initiatives: Facilitating Private Health Financing at Scale

Swiss TPH, …. ;

Dragos Dobre

This forward-looking session explores how openIMIS can be positioned and extended to serve as a trusted digital public good backbone for small and emerging private insurance providers seeking to finance health services in low- and middle-income markets. We will identify the minimal yet powerful feature set required—streamlined digital enrollment, dynamic premium engines, mobile money integration, offline-first capabilities, and lightweight regulatory reporting—while maintaining full compatibility with public-sector schemes. Real-world use cases and early pilot feedback will illustrate how private initiatives can leverage openIMIS to reduce time-to-market, lower operational costs, and contribute modular improvements back to the core platform. Participants will engage in a collaborative prioritization exercise to shape a private-sector accelerator roadmap. This proposal embodies the spirit of forging stronger public-private partnerships and demonstrates openIMIS's unique potential to catalyze inclusive health financing ecosystems worldwide.

Day 3, Open Space - Break-out sessions, tbc (based on voting!)

5

Co-Creating the openIMIS Product Roadmap: From Country Needs to a Shared Community Prioritization Framework

openIMIS Coordination Desk, Swiss TPH, …. ;

• openIMIS Product Group representative

• GIZ openIMIS representative

• Country implementation representative

• Technical partner representative

This interactive session will use the community meeting as an opportunity to move from dispersed implementation needs and development ideas toward a shared openIMIS product roadmap. Rather than presenting a fixed roadmap, the session will invite participants to identify the most important priorities for the next phase of openIMIS: core platform modernization, technical debt reduction, usability improvements, interoperability, new social protection use cases, country-specific needs, and reusable innovations that should become part of the global product.
Participants will work with a simple prioritization framework combining operational value, urgency, reuse potential across countries, technical feasibility, implementation risk, and strategic alignment. The discussion will also help distinguish what should belong to the openIMIS core product, what should remain configurable, and what may be better handled as country-specific extensions. The expected output is not a final roadmap, but a shared prioritization map that can inform the Product Group, future release planning, and product management activities.

Day 3, Open Space - Break-out sessions, tbc (based on voting!)

6

User Feedback Lab: Testing UI Improvements for Responsive Design, Search Options, and Task Management

… , Swiss TPH;

• UX/UI lead or front-end developer

• Country user representative

• Implementation partner representative

• openIMIS Product Group representative

This practical feedback session will invite openIMIS users, implementers, and developers to review proposed user interface improvements and assess whether they respond to real operational needs. The session will focus on three concrete areas: responsive design for use across laptops, tablets, and mobile devices; improved search and filtering options to help users find records, claims, households, policies, and tasks more efficiently; and task management features that could help teams organize work queues, approvals, follow-up actions, assignments, deadlines, and status tracking.
Participants will be invited to react to mock-ups, user journeys, or live demonstrations and to discuss the improvements from the perspective of different user roles, including enrolment officers, claims officers, supervisors, administrators, and managers. The session should help validate which changes would most improve usability, reduce operational friction, and support adoption in country implementations. The expected output is a structured feedback matrix linking proposed UI improvements to user roles, priority use cases, usability risks, and potential backlog items.
Preparation is required for this session and depends on the approval from GIZ. This might not be possible based on the current priorities of developers and the need of a UX/UI front-end developer (e.g. Olivier from SolDevelo).

Parking Lot

*potential co-facilitator: developer / implementer Nepal (tbc)

7

Configuring Business Workflows in openIMIS: Code-Defined Logic, UI-Driven Configuration, or Hybrid Models?

…, Swiss TPH;

• Technical architect (Patrick Delcroix?)

• Implementation partner representative

• Country operations representative

• openIMIS Product Group representative

Many openIMIS implementations need to adapt operational workflows to national rules, institutional processes, and evolving scheme requirements. This session will explore a strategic design question for the platform: which workflows should remain code-defined, which should become configurable through the user interface, and where a hybrid model would provide the best balance between flexibility, maintainability, auditability, and technical integrity.
Using examples such as claims review, enrolment validation, contribution collection, approval chains, exception handling, provider contracting, and grievance or appeal processes, participants will compare the advantages and risks of different workflow models. Code-defined workflows can offer stronger control, testability, and stability, while UI-driven configuration can empower implementers and reduce dependence on development teams. However, excessive flexibility can also create governance, upgrade, testing, and support challenges. The expected output is a set of practical design principles indicating which types of workflow logic should be hard-coded, configurable, template-based, or governed through extensions, together with implications for documentation, testing, permissions, and release management.

Day 3, Open Space - Break-out sessions, tbc (based on voting!)

8

Defining the Product Manager Role in the openIMIS Initiative: From Distributed Contributions to Coherent Product Leadership

….

• GIZ openIMIS representative

• openIMIS Product Group representative

• Country implementation representative

• Technical consortium representative

This session will discus on how dedicated product management could strengthen the openIMIS Initiative. As openIMIS scales across multiple countries, partners, and development workstreams, the initiative needs mechanisms to maintain product coherence, reduce fragmentation, prioritize transparently, integrate country-level innovations, and communicate a clear product direction to governments, donors, implementers, and technical contributors.
The discussion will clarify what a Product Manager role should and should not do in a community-driven, open-source initiative. Topics will include product vision, roadmap ownership, backlog prioritization, release planning, stakeholder engagement, development coordination, acceptance criteria, quality and user experience standards, product analytics, documentation, and community building. Special attention will be given to how the role would interact with GIZ, the openIMIS Product Group, country teams, technical partners, and governance bodies. The expected output is a refined understanding of the role, its decision rights, working interfaces, success indicators, and the practical conditions needed for the role to add value without replacing community ownership.

Parking Lot

9

Fishbowl on Disability Status Registry

UNICEF

Day 3, Open Space - Break-out sessions, tbc (based on voting!)

10

Managing solutions

openIMIS Coordination Desk, WB, UNICEF, WFP, ILO, ..

Exchange on how to manage digital solutions (develop, maintain) around different use cases in health and social protection.

Day 3, Open Space - Break-out sessions, tbc (based on voting!)

Joint Learning Network for UHC, Amref Health Africa;

Rahul S Reddy Kadarpeta, Tushar Mokashi