Building sustainable digital public goods through academic partnerships: the approach of openIMIS
© Department of Health Informatics (DOHI), Kathmandu University, Nepal.
Partnerships between openIMIS and academic institutions create a win-win – building local digital capacity, embedding digital public goods in health and social protection systems, and strengthening the long-term evolution of openIMIS.
In a computer lab at Kathmandu University in Nepal, master’s students in health informatics gather around a screen as systems specialists Sunil Parajuli and Sajit Manandhar demonstrate how openIMIS – the digital platform used to manage Nepal’s national health insurance programs – draws on data from the Bahmni Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system to manage insurance claims.
Through live demonstrations and guided practical exercises using openIMIS, students learn how health insurance programs operate in real world settings – from registering beneficiaries and processing claims to understanding how data moves between digital platforms.
‘The workshop on openIMIS has helped bridge the gap between theoretical concepts and their practical application,’ says master’s student Sijal Rupakheti. ‘The hands-on exercises made it easier to understand how patient data is used to process insurance claims in an interoperable system.’
The experience of the global openIMIS initiative over the past decade has shown that investing in partnerships with academic institutions, like the one with Kathmandu University, is a win-win. These partnerships benefit countries by building local digital capacities and embedding digital public goods within health and social protection systems, while also contributing directly to the ongoing development of the software. Universities and medical schools in other countries, including Indonesia and the Philippines, are pursuing similar approaches.
Building digital capacities sustainably
For digital public goods to grow and be sustained, they must be embedded within a country’s institutional and professional landscape. As incubators of future talent in both IT and public health, universities can play a critical role in building understanding of digital public goods and developing the skills and confidence needed to use and maintain them.
Partnerships between openIMIS and academic institutions offer students more than academic qualifications; they create a bridge between education and professional practice. Access to internships and mentoring, and participation in the global openIMIS community of practice, support students to transition into professional roles where they can contribute to their country’s long-term digital development.
Furthermore, working with openIMIS provides students with a “seat at the table”, allowing them to participate in national and regional discourse around health financing, helping students situate their work within broader public health and social protection agendas.
The integration of openIMIS into the curriculum at Kathmandu University in Nepal offers an interesting example of how universities are building digital capacities sustainably.
case study – Nepal: building Nepal’s digital workforce
The School of Engineering at Kathmandu University in Nepal hosts the country’s first dedicated Department of Health Informatics where students from different disciplines – including computer science, health informatics, medicine, and public health – can enrol in a one-month Health Financing and Economics course. Through lectures and practical sessions, students learn how openIMIS supports health financing in low- and middle-income countries, and gain first-hand experience of installing, configuring and using the software.
Some eight million people in Nepal are enrolled in the insurance schemes of the national Health Insurance Board, managed through the openIMIS platform. Rabindra Bista, a Professor at Kathmandu University and the architect of the course, notes that integrating openIMIS into the curriculum helps ensure that students leave university better prepared to contribute to the work of these important Nepali public institutions.
The course starts with the foundations, progressively building knowledge and skills, and is open to both technical and non-technical students. Course Lecturer and researcher, Ashish Koirala, explains, ‘we purposefully start with the basics, using tailored teaching materials that we developed ourselves, and we ensure all students gain a clear understanding of how openIMIS and Nepal’s health insurance system work.’
Beyond the basics, the curriculum covers the openIMIS modular architecture, including its server and database structure, and the FHIR principles and protocols for healthcare data interoperability. Students learn why interoperability is critical for the delivery of more integrated and efficient health financing services.
By working with a real digital public good in interdisciplinary teams, students develop practical problem-solving skills and learn how to collaborate in managing complex tasks, such as claims processing. To date, more than 60 students have been trained on openIMIS at Kathmandu University.
This programme is already helping to build a new generation of digital health specialists in Nepal, who in turn support others on their digital journeys. Dipesh Khadka, lecturer and researcher at the Health Informatics Laboratory, says, ‘My journey with openIMIS began as a Data Manager at Dhulikhel Hospital. I then deepened my knowledge with a master’s in health informatics at Kathmandu University and today, I help teach openIMIS to undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University.’
It’s all about the networking: the role of health informatics associations
Health informatics associations play a critical role in enabling partnerships between digital public goods and academic institutions by bringing together decision makers, academic researchers, practitioners, and digital health specialists with a shared interest in health information systems. In fact, these networks are often where the most important conversations about digital health take place.
From global associations such as the International Medical Informatics Association, to regional and national associations such as the Health Informatics in Africa Association (HELINA) and the Kenya Health Informatics Association (KeHIA), these networks act as gateways to scholarly exchange through conferences, webinars, and opportunities for collaborative research.
As the openIMIS regional hub for Asia, the Asia eHealth Informatics Network (AeHIN) supports the application of digital solutions for social health protection and facilitates academic partnerships between openIMIS and universities in Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines, where openIMIS is used to teach students about health financing systems.
With support from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), AeHIN is also facilitating the development of digital labs at academic institutions in the region, such as the Virtual Interoperability Lab at Tribhuvan University in Nepal. AeHIN has also helped develop proposals for a virtual openIMIS National Simulation Lab that would serve as a teaching and learning resource at the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka.
As Uwe Wahser, IT Specialist at openIMIS, says:
It is really all about networking. Health informatics associations are a great resource that initiatives for digital public goods such as openIMIS can readily tap into, creating value on both sides.
Universities as platforms for policy-relevant research
Universities play a crucial role in building the evidence base for digital public goods. Through applied research, peer-reviewed publications, student theses, and collaboration with implementing partners, they generate policy-relevant insights into how tools such as openIMIS perform in real-world settings – including their effectiveness, scalability, and contribution to universal health coverage and social protection goals. Over time, this growing body of evidence helps make the case for public investment, as well as continued support from development partners.
openIMIS actively encourages academics to get involved in the Initiative, for example by providing a page on the openIMIS Wiki – Getting Started as an Academic – which provides useful information, such as lists of incubator ideas and opportunities, past projects, and links to academic publications that demonstrate the growing evidence base. As openIMIS becomes more widely adopted, these efforts are increasingly bearing fruit.
For example, with funding from the German Institute for Development Evaluation, the Heidelberg Institute of Public Health is studying the impact of introducing openIMIS to manage Cameroon’s reproductive health voucher program, Chèque Santé. The study – Digital Technologies for Health Financing in Cameroon – examines how digitalization affects women’s access to services and financial protection, as well as the management and efficiency of the program.
In Indonesia, through a partnership between openIMIS, the Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) and AeHIN, a team has undertaken a detailed comparative analysis of openIMIS workflows and those of Badan Penyelenggara Jaminan Sosial-Kesehatan (BPJS-K), which manages Indonesia’s national social health insurance program, Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional (JKN). The comparative analysis has been published in Indonesian (Comparative Analysis of the Indonesian Health Insurance System with openIMIS: A Technical and Policy Perspective), and an English translation is forthcoming.
Anis Fuad, Senior Lecturer at UGM’s Faculty of Medicine, Public Health and Nursing, underlines the importance of publishing comparative research for opening up informed policy debate, particularly in contexts where open-source software has not traditionally been used to support national systems.
case study – Indonesia: from openIMIS to openJKN
In 2019, the partnership with UGM led to the introduction of openIMIS into the curriculum of the university’s Masters in Public Health (MPH), where it is used to teach some 200 – 300 students per year about health financing and social protection systems.
In just over a decade, JKN has grown into the world’s largest single-payer health insurance scheme, covering nearly all of the country’s 280 million people. While this rapid pace of expansion has attracted interest from around the world, it has also contributed to a complex and fragmented digital landscape in which different health information systems do not always communicate seamlessly. The government is addressing this through the establishment of SATUSEHAT (One Health), a national health information system intended to integrate the platforms into a more unified digital ecosystem.
Given the scale and complexity of Indonesia’s health insurance landscape, access to a laboratory-style learning environment is particularly valuable, providing space for students to work with realistic sample data and explore the country’s national health insurance workflows without the risks associated with working on live national systems.
With this in mind, a small team of UGM professors and grad students looked at the potential for customizing openIMIS to provide practice-based teaching tools – in short, to create an openJKN sandbox or “mini-JKN” lab. Dr Lukman Heryawan, Associate Professor and Head of the Software and Data Engineering Laboratory at UGM, explains:
following the example of openIMIS in Nepal, we believe openJKN could evolve into a national learning platform for shared, interdisciplinary teaching on health financing.
Students contribute to innovation and system improvement
Academic collaborations also actively support the continuous development of digital public goods, such as openIMIS. Through university mini-labs, such as those at Kathmandu University and Tribhuvan University in Nepal, students can contribute to the improvement of the software rather than being passive learners. Laboratory set-ups encourage experimentation and entrepreneurship, while also strengthening the pipeline of technical talent that supports openIMIS over time.
Under structured supervision, university students from a wide range of countries, including India, Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, as well as European countries, are participating in vital development activities for openIMIS, including module development, testing and quality assurance, and system optimization.
Dragos Dobre, Project Leader and IT Systems Architect at SwissTPH – who is also a long-standing openIMIS developer and mentor – explains that students often bring valuable new perspectives:
We developers know openIMIS by heart and don’t always see what is new. Students contribute a fresh vision, while benefiting from the opportunity to build something themselves and expand their professional networks.
Marvin Marqua, a recent graduate of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, contributed directly to the improvement of the openIMIS software as part of his master’s thesis in medical informatics. He developed an offline mode for the web-based application – a critical functionality in low-resource settings where reliable internet connectivity cannot be guaranteed.
Initiatives beyond formal university courses also play an important role. Through the Code4GovTech (C4GT) initiative, for example, experienced mentors support students to work on clearly defined problem statements for global open-source platforms like openIMIS. During the 2025 Dedicated Mentoring Program, student Vijay Kv focused on improving how openIMIS exchanges data with other digital health systems by working on openIMIS’ FHIR R4 module, while Anuj Tripathi worked on updating openIMIS’s user interface technology.
And at the MARS Centre for Entrepreneurship at Mannheim University for Applied Sciences, students from the informatics and business departments worked together for a semester to create a mobile app for openIMIS, while also designing a viable business model. Opportunities such as these provide a structured entry point into public-interest digital development.
Academic partnerships drive long-term sustainability
At the national level, sustainable implementation of digital public goods depends on strong local capacities and a professional community that understands both the technology and the context in which it is implemented. Digital public goods become more accessible and sustainable as increasing numbers of graduates acquire the skills needed to operate, maintain, and improve them. This gradually reduces reliance on external technical assistance and donor funding, which is urgently needed in today’s financially constrained world.
Professor Rabindra Bista, who is also an openIMIS Country Hub Consultant in Nepal, says,
So many digital initiatives are dependent on donors, so for us there is a real sustainability issue. We need our own systems in-country, like openIMIS, that we can manage ourselves.
Uwe Wahser also reflects on the long-term impact of openIMIS’ work in Nepal, saying, ‘Following this approach, I believe Nepali experts have proven that they are able to maintain the system themselves.’ And referring to all those who have worked on the openIMIS software, he continues, ‘this is the fruit of more than 15 years of efforts in Nepal, and the contributors should all be very proud.’
Looking to the future
Academic partnerships are also critical for sustaining openIMIS as a global digital public good. The example of DHIS2 – developed and hosted by the HISP Centre at the University of Oslo – provides an inspiration. As Saurav Bhattarai, openIMIS Team Leader, notes, ‘a major catalyst for working with academia is seeing the success of DHIS2 and what it has been able to achieve.’ While DHIS2 continues to attract substantial external financing, it demonstrates how training, research, and technical leadership anchored in a university setting support the long-term sustainability and global scale of the program.
Building on these experiences, the global openIMIS initiative is actively looking to expand partnerships with universities and national health informatics networks, not only in Africa and Asia but also globally. In Germany, for example, the German Association for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS) brings together academics from more than 40 universities with courses in medical informatics, providing a network of graduates who are interested in digital development. European universities have access to research funding that universities in less well-resourced countries lack, giving rise to opportunities for cross-subsidization. These networks, however, are based on mutual trust; forging new academic partnerships is a process that cannot be rushed.
The strength of a digital public good like openIMIS lies not only in the quality of its code, but in the community that supports it. By bringing openIMIS into classrooms and university labs around the world, academic partnerships help expand this community – introducing new generations of developers, implementers, and researchers to the platform.
As advocates for open, public-interest digital solutions, graduates trained in openIMIS can help shape how health and social protection systems are designed and governed, contributing to sustainable, efficient, and effective health insurance and social protection systems that can deliver services to the people that need them, when they need them most.
Corinne Grainger & Sunil Parajuli
March 2026