💰 Let's talk about Cost: Seeking to interview Implementers & Dev Leaders 📞

Community
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Dear Community,

:telephone_receiver: Seeking people for 30-min interviews

  • Are you an experienced OpenMRS Developer or Implementer, who has set up real-world instances? We would really like to hear some of your recent experiences / stories!
  • :date: Grab time with me! Booking Link: :star: :backhand_index_pointing_right: https://om.rs/meetgrace30min :backhand_index_pointing_left: :star:
  • What we’ll talk about: I will just ask you to share a few stories about what was smooth, what was rough or took time, and anything else you’re comfortable sharing about where you’re noticing things with OpenMRS are taking the most cost, pain, or time from you/your team. You don’t have to share any specific $ amounts (unless you really want to).
  • Then what? In a few weeks (probably ~6) I’ll share my key learnings with the community, so we can have a public discussion about how to improve any priority “rough edges”. Let’s fix what’s painful!

Background: Now more than ever, cost matters.

We know many implementers have to walk a challenging balance between very price-sensitive payers (eg government contracts or philanthropies) and the cost they need to charge in order to support their business. This seems especially true right now as many funders (e.g. from US, EU) are tightening their foreign aid budgets.

It’s clear to all of us who help steward OpenMRS that supporting local, in-country implementer organizations is extremely important. A thriving ecosystem of OpenMRS vendors also creates more opportunities for the many volunteers who come to our community hoping for job opportunities - it’s win-win!

Meanwhile, Ministries of Health and Ministries of IT are also in a challenging situation right now. Any Ministry that was relying on foreign funding for their Digital Health Systems is suddenly seeing that funding drastically reduced, more than ever before. This means many healthcare systems need a more cost-effective system than ever.

What are we doing about it? Over the last few years, our community has worked together to try and make OpenMRS v3 (O3) an easier-to-roll-out product. We want to find the “rough-spots” where things are confusing or challenging for developers and implementers trying to roll-out OpenMRS. This is one reason we’ve invested more in Docker, and then in documentation, but there’s probably more we can do together to make the Developer + Implementer experience faster and more cost-effective. We could assume that we know where the top problems are, and we have some ideas - but we want to confirm this through interviews with our community!

Can’t wait to hear from you!

Grab time with me! Booking Link: :star: :backhand_index_pointing_right: https://om.rs/meetgrace30min :backhand_index_pointing_left: :star:

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Interesting Study

In 2012, a study of an OpenMRS hybrid (Baobab) in Malawi found that by year 3 of the EMR, there was a net financial gain, and over 5 years the estimated net benefit / financial gain was >$600,00 USD even after accounting for costs of installation and sustainment.

Do you know of other interesting stories or cost / ROI / Benefit studies? Let us know in this thread!

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Hey Grace, I-TECH conducted a costing study some time ago, and while the figures have likely changed, some of the insights may still be relevant. Here is the link.

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Hi Grace,

Thanks for putting this initiative together — I’d be happy to join a call to share our experience. As a long-time OpenMRS implementer and digital health experts , I’ve been part of the journey where we’ve seen firsthand the challenge of maintaining EMR systems in low-resource settings, especially when it comes to ongoing infrastructure costs, monitoring, and the dependency on external funding. These realities are what led us to start the EMR4All project with a focus to create a community-driven, non-profit effort to make OpenMRS more accessible and sustainable for countries that need it most . It began as an experiment and now turning into a growing movement, where high skilled OpenMRS developers and implementers are contributing contributing to expand to OpenMRS and Bahmni beeing accessible with cost-effective which MoH can procure and maintain localy without heavy external dependencies.

– all the EMR4All journey has been reached with NO formal project funding , building on value created approach . I’d love to share more of this journey and the lessons we’ve learned which I guess could help the community better manage these kinds of lean.

Looking forward to connecting soon!

Benjamin