openIMIS Newsletter - September 2026

Welcome to our September 2026 newsletter! Many exciting things have happened that we want to call your attention to:

2026 Community Meeting | Jun 23-25
Hybrid Session: Forging Stronger Partnerships and Global Scalability | Jun 23-25
openIMIS Study Tour | Jun 22

Three webinars organized by AeHIN and openIMIS | Aug 25 -27
AI in Health Hackathon & Developers Deep Dive | Jul

KeHIA: Prototype to Production & Women in Digital Health | Jul
Call for submissions to the DCI - Interoperability Standards in Action Challenge | Nov 13

Your openIMIS Coordination Desk Team

The openIMIS coordination desk would like to express our solidarity with the people of Nepal following the devastating natural disaster on August 26, 2026.

openIMIS Events in Nepal

2026 Community Meeting | Jun 23-25

The openIMIS Community Meeting was held at the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the openIMIS Initiative and coincided with the 10th anniversary of Social Health Insurance in Nepal. It took place in June 2026 in Kathmandu, bringing together more than 120 participants from 20 countries including implementers, developers, user organizations, partners and funders of the openIMIS Initiative. In a 3-day workshop, the participants discussed updates on community, product development, and implementation.

You can find a video reel with some highlights of the 2026 Community Meeting here.

During those days, the participants convened in multiple sessions, panels and discussions. If you want to read up on the sessions, please find information on our wiki.

openIMIS Community Meeting: Forging Stronger Partnerships and Global Scalability

Hybrid Session: Forging Stronger Partnerships and Global Scalability | Jun 24

The panel discussion "Forging Stronger Partnerships and Global Scalability" was a highlight of the openIMIS Community Meeting 2026 in Kathmandu. The session explored how experiences from country implementations and collaborative partnerships with global stakeholders like the ILO, UNICEF, the World Bank, and beyond have expanded openIMIS from a health financing tool into a versatile Digital Public Good (DPG) for the management of wider social protection programs.

The panelists shared firsthand experiences on how openIMIS' modular, country-driven architecture has enabled adaptability, from cash transfers and humanitarian assistance to an outlook on potential use cases such as disability-inclusive systems and climate-responsive social protection. The discussion underscored how shared ownership, open-source collaboration, and decentralized knowledge-sharing have driven innovation and scalability in digital health and social protection.

You can read more about the session on our website and watch a recording of the entire session here.

Picture from the openIMIS Study Tour in Nepal

openIMIS Study Tour | Jun 22

Many community members and interested parties find it especially valuable to learn from real-world experiences and processes, seeing firsthand how a system runs day-to-day. Alongside this year's community meeting, openIMIS organized a study tour giving participants the opportunity to see how openIMIS is used in practice at Dhulikhel Hospital, a 500-bed tertiary hospital covering a population of approximately 2.5 million people, is empaneled with both HIB and SSF. This allowed participants to observe both openIMIS program and system processes from the provider's side.

Across the visit, participants were guided through topics including beneficiary identification, service provision, and claims submission processes, in addition to learning about the three organizations themselves.

If you would like to find out more about the country implementations and the organizations involved, you can visit our wiki.

Recent Events and Activities

Three webinars organized by AeHIN and openIMIS | Aug 25 - 27

Three webinars organized by the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) and openIMIS took place in August.

First, in a session covering the openIMIS Sandbox, we learned about technical blueprints, comprehensive sandbox documentation, and practical, field-tested insights for deploying standards-aligned health financing workflows at scale. Then, our session on AI in healthcare covered how this technology can be used to strengthen health insurance systems by improving claims management, fraud control, data use, efficiency, and decision-making, while ensuring equity, ethics, and privacy. Finally, the third session highlighted a project developed during Kathmandu University’s Hackathon. Here, a team from Kathmandu University introduced us to NIYAM, a claim integrity layer designed for openIMIS.

All the webinars have been uploaded to YouTube:

To see earlier editions of AeHIN’s great webinars, please check their wiki documentation.

openIMIS and partners at healthcare hackathon in Berlin

AI in Health Hackathon & Developers Deep Dive | Jul

Colleagues from our openIMIS team had a chance to participate in an AI-in Health Hackathon organized by the University Hospital Schleswig Holstein, Price-Waterhouse-Cooper (PwC) and Google Germany. The Healthcare Hackathon Berlin marked its 10th anniversary and brought together more than 400 participants. While one of the challenges during the hackathon was proposed by openIMIS, the team ended up learning a lot about how to connect Large Language Models (LLMs) to openIMIS. A hackathon challenge proposed by the openIMIS Initiative was selected for the hackathon, which allowed the team to work with AI-experts on-site and the openIMIS online community. The participants explored technologies that can be used for LLM-driven business processes such as data verification of claims, on-demand analysis and dashboards, and early warning systems on excessive drug prescription or alarming epidemiological trends.

This experience sparked more interesting discussions, and you can read all about it on our wiki. There, you can also watch the Developers Deep Dive, where the potential of LLMs for openIMIS is explored.

Partner Events

KeHIA: Prototype to Production & Women in Digital Health | Jul

Kenya Health Informatics Association (KeHIA) has had very busy months. First, they hosted a successful Digital Health Financing Hackathon at Strathmore University, where students developed innovative solutions addressing healthcare financing challenges in the country. Then the team organized a follow-up online panel discussion on scaling digital health innovations from prototype to adoption within health systems in Africa.

The online panel From Prototype to Production: Scaling the openIMIS Hackathon Innovations explored how to successfully scale innovations after a hackathon, and how health financing innovations are shaping the future of digital health. It also included presentations from the winning teams of the hackathon, who got to showcase their projects. Finally, it examined how an open and interoperable infrastructure like openIMIS can make digital health innovations easier.

Additionally, in a second edition of their webinar series on women in digital health technologies in Africa, KeHIA brought together women leading the design, development and delivery of digital health solutions across the continent for a conversation exploring the technical aspects that shape effective digital health technologies. The event titled Women Creating Digital Health Technologies; Pathways, Practice and Perspectives had many women in the sector participate who shared what helped them build technical expertise and credibility.

You can access the recording of both events by joining KeHIA's Digital Health Network.

Call for submissions to the DCI Standards in Action Challenge | Nov 13

The Digital Convergence Initiative (DCI) has launched a global Standards in Action Challenge. DCI is calling on governments, technical teams, and development partners worldwide to submit case studies on successful interoperability experiences, lessons from non-adoption of standards, and examples of DCI standards adoption. The top case studies have the opportunity to win awards, including travel opportunities to present their cases.

The official submission deadline is November 13, 2026.

openIMIS Newsletter - September 2026

openIMIS Events in Nepal

Recent Events and Activities

Partner Events

Recommended reading

Key resources