Greetings community! I want to update everyone on where we are with O3 & CDS.
We keep finding over the years that getting a Rule Engine for OpenMRS is one of those “Twilight Zone” or “Tragedy of the Commons” things: it’s hard, gets messy quickly, and takes a lot of time investment. This is why most implementations’ rules are hard-coded (e.g. implementation-specific JSON that’s not re-useable in another implementation). So we have been dedicating some supported time on this topic: @samuel34 @ibacher and myself have been digging deeper into CDS in 2025.
Key updates:
-
Documentation: This Wiki Page is very detailed and we are using this as our “Mothership” for our CDS work and use cases. Please have a look if you’re interested in this topic:
2025 CDS Wiki Page
-
We are solving for the need for a “CDS Engine” for OpenMRS. We believe the Drools Rule Engine is the answer, and are investing engineering time into setting up Drools with OpenMRS. (Lots more detail on this in the wiki page above
)
-
Community Involvement Plan: We plan to have a community showcase of this work soon; ideally during the upcoming community virtual meeting in April. (We’re just not quite ready yet; it’s still a bit early-days, but we hope to open up this project later in 2025.)
-
Challenges: Even with the roadmap now clear for the CDS Engine side of things, the most befuddling part from the BA-side is finding freely available, trustworthy, up-to-date content sources that any country can use. Things with a great hierarchy like SNOMED CT require licenses, and many countries who use the RefApp don’t have a license.
(@samuel34 can you reply here with the GitHub link to your work? I can’t recall the repo )