Dear Bahmni Team, OpenHMIS organization has created inventory and billing modules to work with OpenMRS. These modules are pretty good and enough for small clinics. Although billing module needs more insurance payment capabilities, but it will substitute the “Registration Fee” in Bahmni if a clinic doesn’t need a whole ERP system.
Has anyone tested OpenHMIS modules with Bahmni?
Thank you
Hello @arak2002… as far as I know, no one who is using Bahmni has tried out the OpenHMIS module. Mostly everyone seems to be satisfied with OpenERP/Odoo, since it seems to provide more Advanced options for future, and is able to handle many edge case scenarios (OpenERP having over thousands of customers already).
@tumga I think is also trying out OpenHMIS with Bahmni. Maybe you both could share your findings on how this goes. If it looks like a good fit, maybe future Bahmni clients can consider using OpenHMIS for light-weight inventory management.
HI, so far OpenHMIS is giving errors installing into bahmni, that it cannot update liquibase.xml, I will try and look for solutions and see how it works, otherwise I will still use OpenERP since it provides a better solution for inventory
@arak2002 I am one of the developers on the OpenHMIS project and I’m curious why you’d want to use OpenHMIS with Bahmani? As you mention, our intended usage of the Cashier and Inventory modules is to support institutions that want a simplified solution and so the setup is pretty easy but feature set is more limited. However, if a more simplified solution is a better option for your institution we would be interested in figuring out how to integrate to two.
As @gsluthra mentions, OpenERP/Odoo already provides a much full-featured solution with a huge user base and part of me feels that if you are considering using the Bahmni distribution you might as well use all the systems that are included. That being said, I am surprised to hear that the OpenHMIS modules won’t currently load in Bahmni as we’re not doing anything special in our liquibase scripts (as far as I know) and we support the recent versions of both the 1.9.x and 1.11.x platform releases (with and without openmrs 2.x).
@tumga Can you share the specific errors that you are getting? Also, what version of Bahmni, OpenMRS, OpenMRS Platform, and MySQL are you using?
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I believe having multiple systems may increase the risk of errors and maintenance bill esp for small clinics and hospitals. These institutions have small storage rooms where OpenHMIS inventory can do the job for them, and it can be integrated with the warehouse management system like OpenBoxes or OpenERP if needed.
If cashier or billing module is able to have insurance payment system, this would be great and enough for small entities. In addition to this, there are two other modules can be helpful and useful for in-patients services: Billable Objects Module & Event-Based Billing Module. I’m not sure if they have been tested and upgraded to work with platform 1.11, but these report every encounters, lab tests, imaging or drugs orders. This will be very good when you have DRG and costing system in place.
Regards,
Hi Abdul, I saw that you were discussing integrating OpenHMIS’ inventory module with Bahmni last year and wanted to follow up to see if you ever used the module (with or without trying to integrate it with Bahmni). If so, I’d love to hear more about the experience and what kind of facility you used it in. We’re trying to get a better understanding of who’s using the modules (and where!) and what their experience has been. Thanks! Jessica
Hi @jgierlichs We haven’t tested it on production but I tried it myself. The modules are awesome esp. the inventory for small clinics. I would love to see insurance payments and plans in the Cashier module for next releases.
Please also check http://bandahealth.org/ for more details and demo.
regards, Abdul
Thanks, Abdul! I actually work for Banda Health myself, we’re trying to find out who’s using the modules. I will let our dev team know about the request for insurance payments and plans.
Thanks again!
Best, Jessica
Jessica Gierlichs
Operations Manager Banda Health
Thanks @jgierlichs for following up. Last chat with @ibewes was in here. Actually I haven’t replied to @ibewes since then (my apologies), but I think I might be able allocate some budget to develop it if you can assign one of your dev team to work on it. Please let me know.
One more thing since you are looking for a feedback, is the movement recorded when a medication (or consumable) is dispensed from the pharmacy to the patient? If yes, how can I see all dispensed items for any patient? Is there any workflow or chart displaying the whole processes?
Thanks again,
We don’t currently have the time to work on better support for insurance schemes (though sites are using our current system and handling insurance payments already, so we do technically support insurance payments) and will not have the time until later this year. Our main need on this right now is to get a better idea of the various types of insurance schemes that exist so that we can accurately specify the design and so anything that you can do to help us understand your needs will be helpful.
Regarding stock movement; yes, our inventory system does record who/what an item stock is distributed to. However, we do not currently show this on the patient dashboard. This is something we’d like to add in the future as it is an obvious need and is something we already do for bills within our cashier module.