I am struggling to find open source device manufacturers to solve a critical medical use case.
Do you have anyone in your network (factory/manufacturer/designer/circuits/microelectronics expert) who would know who could help build an open source vitals measurement platform?
For example, we need SpO2, blood pressure, height, weight, etc, or some subset thereof, so the data can be entered into OpenMRS automatically.
After finishing my PhD I work at an academic medical center, and through this work with an NGO doing open source telehealth delivery in rural India (https://intelehealth.org).
The biggest pain point for the community health workers is manual data entry - they currently write heart rate, blood pressure, height, weight, etc on paper and then enter it into an Android app that integrates OpenMRS.
We cannot afford to use proprietary solutions, and I need a cost estimate to pitch this to a philanthropic org like the Gates foundation. The long-run goal is to solve delivery of health and intervention with open source AI and machine learning (e.g. here is an example of a system I have built used in hospitals: [1904.05342] ClinicalBERT: Modeling Clinical Notes and Predicting Hospital Readmission).
Please DM me if you need specifics.
Thanks so much! And thank you for your work on OpenMRS, happy to help in any way I can to deploy AI/machine learning to solve critical use cases. I am convinced that Epic cannot solve the problems we can, especially where machine learning & AI can be used for clinical decision support in low- and middle-income countries.
If that’s the single biggest pain point, then it can be solved with OpenMRS 3 (aka O3) that supports offline data collection (aka “OpenMRS Offline”).
In a nutshell, in O3, it is possible to define which patient files can be taken offline and which part of the workflow (so which forms) can be taken offline.
Hi @jaan , do you imagine having sensors attached to the patient and the data automatically pushed to OpenMRS (i.e. blood pressure, SpO2, heart rate, etc)?
If the use case is to be able to collect information while offline, OpenMRS 3.x will certainly address those issues as @mksd mentioned. However, if multiple clinicians and multiple devices are used to take care of a single patient while collecting data offline, then you will need to sync the devices data to get the full medical record, otherwise, the clinician will only see the information they added in the device. Additionally, if the same patietn was registered offline using different devices, you will also need to match those records.
We are supporting the development of offline functionality, data synchronization and patient matching.
Yes, multiple sensors could be attached to and removed from the patient by a nurse, and the vitals measurements would automatically be pushed to OpenMRS.