HMIS Collaboration

[Wesley Brown]

Greetings!

During the OpenMRS implementers meeting last week (which was excellent!) I was struck by the number of teams working on adding Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) features to, or at least accessible from, OpenMRS. It is nice to know that there are others in the community that are working towards this need!  My team is working on a project called OpenHMIS that is building generalized basic HMIS features inside of OpenMRS for institutions that don't need all the features that a full-fledged inventory/pharmacy/lab/etc system provides.  We are obviously very interested in what these other groups are doing.

While each group working on adding HMIS features obviously has their own specific requirements, we believe that there is enough commonality between, for example, each inventory system that we could design a single service to handle the majority of cases and then extend it as needed.  The benefits of this are threefold:

1. The OpenMRS development community is able to share the costs associated with designing and implementing these systems
2. Modules that use these systems can code to the service and work with any implementation
3. Supports both external systems and OpenMRS-internal systems

I am not sure what the next steps should be but I wanted to start the discussion here (if that discussion is already ongoing somewhere else, sorry!).  If people are interested I can create a project page and start fleshing the design and/or discuss on an upcoming design call.  My vision is that, if designed properly, the OpenHMIS Cashier module should be able to use our simple Inventory module or an OpenERP Inventory system without any code changes.  Same thing for a pharmacy dispensing module; it simply becomes a front-end that utilizes interchangeable HMIS services.  While this may be optimistic even if we can get 75% of the way there we would save ourselves a lot of development time and effort!

-Wes Brown

Lead Developer

OpenHMIS Project

www.OpenHMISAfrica.org

[Bob Jolliffe]

Hi Stephane

There is no relationship.  I guess  a bit of confusion is possible over acronyms in that DHIS is often described as an HMIS, but that meaning Health Management Information System, rather than Hospital Management Information System.

Interesting googling HMIS shows by far the widest use of the term seems to be Homeless Management Information System.

Bob

On 18 October 2013 19:32, stephane morisseau <smori...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Wes 

Can you tell me waht would be the difference of the Open HMIS project and the DHiS2 

Thanks 

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[awanth sen]

Hi Bob,

could you explain the main difference between an HMIS and an MRS system? when is an MRS used? an HMIS is used inside a hospital and as you say many customization is needed for conversion of MRS to an HMIS.

thanks,

regards

[Bob Jolliffe]

I think there are others on this list much, much more competent than me to answer this.  But here's some throwaway thoughts ...

In principle, I don't think you "convert" the Medical Record System to a Hospital Management Information System.  At best you might say the MRS can be a component of the Hospital Management System.  Or could exist alongside.

Both are used inside a hospital.  The MRS is primarily targeted at clinicians rather than hospital managers.  But there are clear links to other audiences as the MRS contains information important for management (such as billing, logistics etc).

And just to clarify again, DHIS2 is often described as a HMIS but this has nothing to do with hospitals.  HMIS in this context refers to a "health management information system" which is used by public health managers.

Bob   

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[Darius Jazayeri]

Hi Wes,

Thanks for sending this out.

Id be very happy if for each HMIS features there is both a "Simple XYZ" module, as well as a way of connecting to a full-fledged external system, and a particular implementation would choose which they want to use based on some maturity module. If the very same OpenMRS front-end can serve both use cases, that's even better. But the devil is in the details. :-)

Wearing my PIH hat, our most immediate HMIS focus is on scheduling appointments, and in the foreseeable future we'll be looking at capturing service utilization (somewhat related to billing), and connecting OpenMRS to OpenBoxes for inventory.

I'd love to see us schedule some design calls on various HMIS topics, with enough lead time to get other interested parties there...

-Darius

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[Wesley Brown]

Awanthika,

Thanks for the questions!  Bob has already made some good points so I'll just add to what he said and give some context about what our team is attempting to do.  We (that is, the OpenHMIS team) are building modules to add hospital management features on top of the existing OpenMRS platform. We believe that there is considerable value in having a single system that can provide both patient-related medical records and administration-related hospital management features; this is something that we hear from administrators almost every time we visit a institution.  Therefore we are creating modules which provide basic hospital management features (cashier, inventory, pharmacy, etc) from within OpenMRS.  

I'm not sure if this answers your question, if it does not please feel free to follow up with me.

Thanks

-Wes

On Saturday, October 19, 2013 6:19:03 PM UTC+3, awanth sen wrote:

Hi,

so you mean to say leaving the hospital specific, non patient related things apart as inventory and billing an MRS and HIMS are essentially the same? as in point of view from a patient or a medical personnel? not the hospital management staff

thanks

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AWANTHIKA SENARATH

Undergraduate

Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering

University of Moratuwa

[Wesley Brown]

Sorry for the confusion here!  I was surprised to see that the most common usage of HMIS (according to Google) is the Homeless MIS, though I guess I shouldn't be as there is likely at least one *MIS for every letter of the alphabet.  That said, perhaps there is a better acronym that I should be using to avoid confusion?

-Wes 

[Wesley Brown]

Darius,

Discussing this during design calls would be great, if we can enough of the interested parties together.  Do you think it would be useful to start a project page on the wiki? I've got some ideas for how to design this (at the API/module/code-level) that might help to at least start the discussion.

-Wes

[r.fri...@mindspring.com]

Wes, I think we began addressing this at https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/projects/OpenMRS-OpenERP+Integration, which includes a comment from you.  We may even have had a design call on this, but I would welcome further discussion.

[Wesley Brown]

Hi Roger,

Thanks for bring this up.  Yes, I looked through that page again before posting this. As I commented there, I think that limiting the discussion and design to just OpenERP integration would be unfortunate.  That said, I am more than happy to start from the existing use-case and requirements; I just want to see that discussion moved forward as it directly impacts our current work on the OpenHMIS team.

-Wes

[Joseph Waweru]

Greetings Wes,

I'll be glad to help wherever I can.

[Wesley Brown]

Great Joseph, thanks!  Hopefully we can get some additional interest from the community and design time in the near future.

-Wes

[Bob Jolliffe]

Hi Wes

Sorry just tracking back through this thread ... In fact I do think HMIS might be a misleading acronym to be using.  Not so much because of the homeless link, but more that in the context of health, particularly at the level of national ministries, the term hmis has a very established and widely understood meaning.  Google "hmis ministry of health" and you will get the idea.  Many dozens of links referring to the health management information system.

Ironically there are quite a few in the dhis2 community who dislike the term HMIS, thinking it dated and clunky and rather talk of HIS.

Can't think of a great replacement acronym right now just flagging it for the moment.  Wherever you talk of HMIS you are going to end up having to explain.

Bob

[Chris Power]

Hi Wes!

It sounds like you have some interest brewing with this.  What type of tasks do you think the community itself can help with?  Is there changes in the main application or the new Reference Application that would make it easier for you to achieve your goals?  If you would like me to help organize some sprint time in the future around this I would be happy to help.

-Chris Power

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[Wesley Brown]

Hey Chris,

I hope that you are correct about the interest!  There are a couple areas that the community could help with:

1. Determining the core functionality that should be exposed by each hospital management service.  For example, what activities are most often needed by an inventory service and what models can represent the objects involved in those activities.
2. Designing a common way to interact with external systems from within OpenMRS. It would be nice if OpenMRS had the primitives needed to create and manage connections to external systems without having to start from scratch for each specific external system.

I'm willing to get this discussion going with a project page (or updating the existing one as mentioned by Roger) if you think that would be helpful.  Any help that the OpenMRS team can provide would be most appreciated.

-Wes

[Wesley Brown]

Hey Bob,

Well I certainly wish I would have spoken to you about this a couple of years ago, before we decided to call our project OpenHMIS.  Oh well, such is life I suppose.  Regardless, thank you for the feedback, at least I can now be more clear when discussing these projects.

-Wes

[Joaquín Blaya]

Just my two cents but for interaction between OpenMRS and another system, I've found Mirth to be pretty good, so even though it requires installing another piece of software, it's much easier than trying to code it directly.  I've created already a couple of connections using either uploading an excel spreadsheet to OpenMRS or using a "connection database" where data is inserted and then I pull it with Mirth and insert it into OpenMRS.

Joaquín
___________________________________________________________________
Gerente de Desarrollo, eHealth Systems
Research Fellow, Escuela de Medicina de Harvard
Moderador, GHDOnline.org

[Wesley Brown]

Joaquin,

I've only used Mirth a little and it is definitely a pretty tight tool for the scenarios that it is tailored for. While I can see the type of usage that you are describing as very useful, I think that we would need tighter integration with external systems at the API level than Mirth (alone) would support. I could see Mirth being used by a specific system provider and being transparent to modules that consume the service.

-Wes