Request for Application #2019-016

openIMIS Modularization, Nepali Functionality, and Community Development

Building the openIMIS community of developers for the next phase of growth

Two-sentence overview: 

The goal of this project is to strengthen and grow the developers community for openIMIS. In line with the open source vision for the tool, Bluesquare is looking to support current and new partners to continue developing the new platform in line with the established architecture.

Executive summary: 

The openIMIS community is looking to prepare for its next phase of growth, modularisation and maturity. This response will focus primarily on the workstream A and B - the modular migration of Core openIMIS and the Nepal Feature Request. Bluesquare will provide the required coordination, development and technical expertise to realise the next phase of the modular development and feature extension. With this guarantee of support, we expect the proposed, existing and new, partners to feel comfortable playing an active role in developing features and modules independently. 

Through this project, we hope to ensure continuity in the community and continue development in line with the agreed upon roadmap. In the spirit of the open source community, we wish to open development work to additional teams which we believe will be key to bring openIMIS to scale. It will help ensure the tool is more sustainable and help absorb and share the workload when it is needed. 

Thanks to our central role in developing the architecture we have a very clear understanding of the current status of the tool, and we are used to working with and coaching other technical partners towards a common goal. In an attempt to share our knowledge of the opportunities and associated challenges Bluesquare proposes to support interested potential partners who are looking to contribute to the further development of the tool in the next phase. We also provided an overview of our current sense of the scope required by module and item requested in this call for proposals. 

Consortium Team: 

Bluesquare is a Belgian data company founded in 2012, focused on digital health in emerging economies around the globe. We have proven experience in designing and leading IT products in use in the UHC sector. Currently Bluesquare manages the architecture development of the openIMIS tool and would bring this experience to bear for the next phase of development. Thanks to our multidisciplinary team including developers, product managers, public health experts and data scientists we are also able to contribute to the broader community discussions. 

For this project Bluesquare proposes to support the next phase of development, serving as a resource for other teams and partners towards successful development. 

VillageReach has agreed to partner with Bluesquare on Work Package 2 focused on integration with a product registry. VillageReach brings deep expertise in supply chain as creators of PCMT and as long-time leaders in the OpenLMIS community. They have actively participated in OpenHIE, including co-chairing the OpenHIE Supply Chain Sub-community. VillageReach is an endorser of the Principles for Digital Development. They proactively support open standards, interoperability, global standards, and open source. They have a track record of effective software development that is agile, transparent, and community-driven along with a rich history of helping advance global goods to support global health and development.  

VillageReach would lead any needed software development on the PCMT side. VillageReach would contribute to establishing the interoperability requirements as well as documenting the working interoperability so that it can be adopted for production use by any implementers and countries.

For Work Package 1 Bluesquare has been in discussion with a potential subcontractor to support the development work required to make the implementation realisable in production in Tanzania.

Workstream: 
Modular Migration of Core openIMIS
Nepal Feature Requests
Geographic Reach: 

Nepal and Tanzania

WHO Classification: 
Health finance and information system
Final Technical Application: 
Application Tags: 
interoperability
openhie
community engagement
FHIR
universal health coveage
Application Status: 
Approved - partially funded

Comments

There has been an issue while uploading the referred annex document. Please find it on openIMIS wiki

Dear

The CRVS integration is present on the SwissTPH/Soldevelo proposal and this one, in order to avoid duplicating the work we propose that we remove it from our proposal.

Best regards.

Dear Bluesquare,

in our tender we are looking to migrate those modules :

  • Enrollment (policies)
  • Premium collection  (contributions)
  • Benefit Plan (Product and product services&item)
  • Payement (not yet on the master version but part of TZ

But we are not planning the migrate:

  • "price lists",
  • "Beneficiary/ familly management"
  • "diagnoses"
  • "Location", 
  • "Item and service"

But we will need to use the contribution from the "item", "services" and "locations"

Are you planning to migrate those in your proposale ?

br

    Dear BlueSquare team,

    Regarding your request about adding developers, VillageReach would like to offer our assistance as a member of your consortium. We have developers on hand with years of experience in building a similar open source tool (OpenLMIS) and have recently developed a global Product Catalog Management Tool as part of another Digital Square initiative. We believe it would be useful to collaborate to ensure OpenIMIS is interoperable with these. Please email PCMT@villagereach.org if you are interested in collaborating on this.

    -Brandon Bowersox Johnson, Director, Digital Solution at VillageReach.org

    Hello to both Brandon and Patrick....Great to have a lot of exchange already and definitely open to the collaborative process with each team to see how we can align. We will be posting our updated proposed methodology later today. Based on this we will reach out to discuss the next steps. Be in touch... Marie-Hélène