openIMIS has its origins in the Insurance Management Information System (IMIS), a custom-made solution for managing district-based community health funds in Tanzania. Since its development in 2012, the software has grown organically and has demonstrated potential for easy adaptation to different types of health financing mechanisms and social protection schemes.
A custom-built solution for community health insurance
With support from the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Microinsurance Academy and Exact Software developed IMIS in 2012 to operate community health funds in several districts of Tanzania. The software quickly proved its ability to manage complex insurance processes by bringing together beneficiary, provider and payer data into a single platform.
In 2014, a mutual health insurance scheme in Cameroon adapted the software for its business processes. A year later, German Development Cooperation (GDC) supported the customisation of IMIS for Nepal’s national health insurance scheme. By the end of 2015, IMIS had shown that it could be easily adapted to different types of health financing mechanisms in diverse settings.
From IMIS to openIMIS
The openIMIS Initiative was established in 2016, with support from GDC and SDC, to transform IMIS from a stand-alone digital solution to an integrated and modular open source software, supported by a community of developers and users. The aim was to make the software available to many more countries working to achieve universal health coverage.
SDC licensed IMIS as open source software under the AGPL3 license, thereby ensuring that the software could be used and adapted free of charge. The source code for openIMIS was published in early 2018 on GitHub.
The openIMIS developer and implementer communities were established in 2018.
Modular transformation and new use cases
