September-November 2025 Newsletter

Welcome to our September-November 2025 newsletter! Many exciting things have happened that we want to call your attention to:

 

Latest Highlights

• World Health Summit Side Event
• New video launched on openIMIS solutions

Upcoming Events: 

• Global Digital Health Forum 2025

Recent Events:

• HELINA - The Pan-African Health Informatics Conference
• New openIMIS release
• openIMIS Stakeholder Conference
• Interoperability Lab Workshop at the EFMI
• Bhela Community Meeting: Celebrating Women in Tech
• Social Protection Solutions Lab

 

Your openIMIS Coordination Desk Team  

 

Latest Highlights

World Health Summit Side Event (Berlin, Germany) | October 14

(📸- Susanne Asheuer) 

The openIMIS Initiative co-organized the GIZ side event: Partnering for Efficiency, Strengthening Collaboration in Health Financing and Digital Health in Times of Resource Constraints.   

Anna Sophie Herken, GIZ managing director, opened the event with looking at the ways that strong cross-functional partnerships in coordinating actors involved in global health and specifically health financing, highlighting how digital transformation is critical for mobilizing resources when those are scarcely available on domestic level. openIMIS was highlighted as an example of an initiative that encourages and demonstrates international cooperation through the network of organizations sponsoring its success. Partnerships around the digitalization of health insurance processes with openIMIS have helped increasing transparency and resilience of health systems, as the examples of Nepal and Cameroon showed. 

 Both countries, through active involvement in partnerships with P4H and openIMIS, have made progress towards Universal Health Coverage and greater resilience and transparency in their healthcare systems. Erika Placella, Head of Health Programme at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, praised openIMIS and partners’ work in ensuring the transformation and development of health financing in LMICs. 

In her closing remarks, Shahrah Razavi, the director of the Social Security department of the ILO, reminded the audience that the majority of the world’s population remains unprotected in the case of illness and injury, and that future partnerships must take justice and solidarity into account, ensuring that no one is left behind.

 

New Video Launched on openIMIS Solutions

A new video is now available highlighting implementations of openIMIS solutions in Nepal, Lao PDR, Nigeria, Cameroon, São Tomé and Príncipe and Burundi.

The video highlights how openIMIS’s modular, open-source architecture enables tailored solutions for diverse local contexts – with innovations developed in one country shared and scaled globally. Showcased advancements include mobile self-enrollment in Nepal, automated membership card generation in Lao PDR, and secure voucher management for maternal care in Cameroon. Each of these innovations not only streamlines administration but also reduces costs, enhances transparency, and broadens access to essential services. 

A central message invites viewers to engage with openIMIS: by leveraging its robust features and joining a vibrant community of practice, new use cases and solutions can be co-created. As the openIMIS network expands, so too does its capacity to tackle emerging challenges and extend life-changing services to millions more. 

What new solutions will openIMIS inspire next? 

Click here to watch on YouTube or share on LinkedIn. 

 

Upcoming Events

Global Digital Health Forum 2025 (Nairobi, Kenya) | December 3-5

Representatives from international and implementing organizations such as World Bank, UNDP, GIZ, AMREF Health Africa, the private sector and academia are gathering to hold workshops, panel discussions and presentations on topics such as AI, interoperability and digital health financing. Representatives from openIMIS will be attending as well (contributing in four sessions based on digital transformation and interoperability):

• Driving Healthcare Transformation: openIMIS as a Catalyst for Interoperability, enabling Universal Health Coverage (Dec 3, 2025) 

• Tailoring Digital health Insurance for UHC: Specificities and Challenges of openIMIS Implementations in Comoros (Dec 4, 2025) 

• From Claim to Care: A Global Goods Interoperability Model to Link CHW Feedback and Health Financing Systems (Dec 3, 2025) 

• Beyond Efficiency: An API-Roadmap for Building Trust and Engagement in Nepal’s Health Insurance Program (Dec 5, 2025) 

For more information, please visit the event website.  

 

Recent Events

HELINA - The Pan-African Health Informatics Conference (Nairobi, Kenya) | August 26-28

Building Sustainable and Resilient Client-Centred Health Informatics Systems for Health Equity in Africa

From August 26–28 at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, HELINA brought together a good mix of contributors - researchers, policymakers, implementers, and tech leaders from across the continent. One of this year’s key themes was health financing - a topic that is frequently overlooked but is now gaining well-deserved attention. 

Several scientific abstracts on openIMIS use cases were accepted and presented at the conference:

• “Challenges and Opportunities of openIMIS Implementation in South and North Kivu, DRC” – by Sylvia Mwelu, El Pacific Binagha, Dragos Dobre, Brigitte Danzagba, and Serge Wembuluwa Ndjadi, highlighting lessons from the pilot, transition, and full implementation phases of openIMIS to strengthen community-based health insurance in fragile settings.
• “The Impact of Open-Source Digital Tools on Health Equity in Africa: The Case of openIMIS” – by Atohmbom Yuh George, Chiakung Ndifor Roger, and Jean Camille Mballa Ndeng, exploring how openIMIS and other digital solutions can drive progress towards Universal Health Coverage across Africa. 

With an eye on international digital standards in health financing, Uwe Wahser and Dragos Dobre featured a presentation on the results from the health financing communities at OpenHIE and IHE: 

• “Five Steps Towards an Integration of Health Financing and Insurance Systems” – presented by Uwe Wahser and Dragos Dobre 

 

New openIMIS Release

The October 2025 software was recently released! This updated version focuses on bug fixing, performance updates, and enhancing the mobile app experience.  

This was the first release managed by our new maintenance team, Jembi, from the Speedykom Group. The openIMIS coordination team is grateful for their support.  

Click here to find the full Release Note. 

 

openIMIS Stakeholder Conference | September 17

The stakeholder conference was a lively virtual event attended by 62 participants, coming from a variety of international development, technical and multilateral organizations.
 
The key objectives of this meeting were: 

• To promote the use of Digital Public Goods in the social protection spheres 

• Highlighting the continued expansion and development of the openIMIS initiative and showcasing openIMIS’ solutions 

• Connecting to organizations and mediators in the humanitarian assistance context and address demand for digital solutions to respond to climate related risks and shocks 

After a short briefing of the openIMIS initiative the first session  provided a breakdown of openIMIS solutions offered - solutions for social health insurance, employment injury insurance, voucher programs, cash transfers and solutions for beneficiary registries. In this session, implementations of these solutions in Nepal, Lao PDR, Nigeria, Cameroon, São Tomé and Príncipe and Burundi were briefly introduced in the form of a short solutions video, complemented by a live presentation from Bangladesh.

The second session, a panel on Responding to Climate-Related Risks and Humanitarian Crisis explored how digital solutions can accelerate and improve the delivery of social assistance during climate-induced disasters and humanitarian emergencies. Experts from WFP, UNICEF, the World Bank, and independent experts shared practical examples - such as UNICEF’s digital cash transfer program in Sri Lanka and WFP’s AI-driven early warning systems in Rwanda – demonstrating how technology can shift responses from reactive to proactive, strengthen system resilience, and bridge gaps between developmental and humanitarian aid. Panellists emphasized the critical need for collaboration, interoperability, and clear data-sharing agreements to avoid duplication and silos, advocating for a coordinated approach and accessible digital public goods marketplace to empower frontline responders and ensure scalable, accountable interventions. 
 
Documentation and links to the recordings of the conference sessions can be found here. Our latest website article provides a summary on the overall event.

 

Interoperability Lab Workshop at the European Federation for Medical Informatics Conference (Osnabrück, Germany) | October 20-22

The openIMIS Initiative participated in a workshop held at the special topic conference of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI-STC) in Osnabrück, Germany. The hybrid session brought together participants from the Universities of Leipzig, Munich, Neu-Ulm and Kempten (all Germany) with online participants from Kathmandu University (Nepal), the Asian eHealth Information Network (AeHIN), the Pan-African Health Informatics Association (HELINA) and many online-members of the Global Health Informatics working group of the German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS). 

Participants exchanged on their respective approaches to setting up software laboratories to explore interoperability between single components of national digital health infrastructures. The openIMIS Initiative shed light on its ongoing project on an interoperability sandbox and offered the openIMIS eClaim portal as an option to interoperability labs that want to test digital workflows around the hospital billing process. 

 

Celebrating Women in Tech

Bhela Community Meeting | September 24

The September Bhela was dedicated to Celebrating Women in Tech, bringing together community members to reflect on women’s contributions, the challenges they face, and practical ways to strengthen support for women working in the tech space. 

Discussions highlighted the stark gender gap in digital access: 885 million women in low- and middle-income countries do not use mobile internet, limiting their ability to learn, train, and participate in the digital economy. Even where women pursue STEM education, the numbers fall sharply when moving into the workforce - in sub-Saharan Africa, 47% of STEM graduates are women, but only 30% of tech jobs are held by women. Women are particularly underrepresented in the areas of coding, cloud computing and AI, as well as in leadership. 

Participants stressed the qualities women bring to the sector – resilience, empathy, technical excellence, inclusiveness, and attention to detail – but also the barriers that too often hold them back, from gender stereotypes and lack of representation to financing constraints and limited opportunities. 

Partners like AeHIN and KeHIA shared examples of initiatives opening doors for women, including mentorship schemes, buddy systems, and grassroots programmes inspiring girls and young women to consider careers in tech. The brainstorming session added further ideas, from giving visibility to local initiatives to showcasing women’s contributions in digital health and creating forums for cross-country peer support. 

The meeting underscored the strong momentum within the openIMIS community to build a more inclusive and resilient tech sector. openIMIS will continue working with partners to amplify women’s voices and contributions in digital health and social protection. 

 

Social Protections Solutions Lab (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) | October 27

Recently, openIMIS participated in a Social Protection Solutions Lab focusing on social protection for gig economy workers – about 12.5% of the world population. Most of these people - from freelance designers to domestic workers and delivery drivers - often work in precarious conditions with almost no social protection coverage.  
 
During the sessions, openIMIS was showcased as a base for potential digital tools to handle the complexities of providing social protection to the growing gig economy landscape. The customizability and interoperability that form a core part of openIMIS could be seen during the workshop as a strength, along with the diverse community of practice. These combined enable openIMIS to deliver flexible, impactful solutions.  
 
The session participants all agreed that cross-border collaboration, leveraging old partnerships while building new ones is key to filling this gap and devising new policies and strategies within social protection.  
 
We would like to thank the attendees for their contributions to a deeply relevant and timely session, and the Solution Lab supporters and organizers: the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), The World Bank, International Labour Organization and the International Social Security Association. 

📸 © GIZ / Erkele Gozalishvili 

Want to stay up to date on upcoming events in social protection and health insurance? Check out our dedicated wiki page, and subscribe to our newsletter and LinkedIn mailing list! There you’ll find updates on who from our team and partners will be attending, key deadlines, and more.