Appointment Service Unavailability — Feature Proposal

Software Bahmni
1

Hello Bahmni / OpenMRS Community, A long asked feature proposal below. :tada:

Background

The Bahmni Appointments module supports recurring weekly availability per service (ServiceWeeklyAvailability), allowing facilities to define operating hours on a day-of-week basis. However, there is currently no way to mark an ad-hoc date/time-bounded period as unavailable — for example, “Facility is closed from 03-Aug 11:00 AM to 04-Aug 11:00 AM due to a public holiday” or “Service X with Provider Y is unavailable on 03-Aug from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM for training”. Facilities today rely on manual workarounds such as blocking individual appointments or disabling services entirely. This proposal introduces a lightweight Unavailability definition layer to address this gap.

What We Are Building

Admins will be able to define an unavailability block by specifying:

  • Location (required) — must carry the Appointment Location tag
  • Start date + Start time and End date + End time (required, stored as separate DATE / TIME columns, consistent with ServiceWeeklyAvailability)
  • Service (optional — leave blank to apply to all services at the location)
  • Provider (optional — leave blank to apply to all providers)

When a service and location are both specified, the service’s location must be the same as or a descendant of the unavailability location, reflecting real-world location hierarchies. The admin UI built on the new bahmni-apps-frontend allows multi-select for service and provider; the REST API accepts a batch array of fully-formed records and persists them in a single transaction.

Data Model

├── location          → org.openmrs.Location         [NOT NULL]
├── service           → AppointmentServiceDefinition  [nullable — null = all services]
├── provider          → org.openmrs.Provider          [nullable — null = all providers]
├── startDate         → java.sql.Date                 [NOT NULL]
├── startTime         → java.sql.Time                 [NOT NULL]
├── endDate           → java.sql.Date                 [NOT NULL]
└── endTime           → java.sql.Time                 [NOT NULL]

Inherits uuid, voided, creator, dateCreated, and related audit fields from BaseOpenmrsData.

User Interaction

  • Admins can defined Services and create weekly availability definitions.

  • Admins can define unavailabilities against a location or a specific service.

  • Users using the appointment booking, while booking appointments they will see a warning as they see today when there is service unavailability.

    We welcome feedback from the community on the model and any extensions that would make this feature more flexible for communities.

cc. @angshuonline @binduak @akhilmalhotra @sumazmrs @rohit.v @mseaton @burke @mogoodrich @dkayiwa

Related talk threads:

Thanks.

1 Like