Digital Square Notice C1: Promoting the collaborative development of proposals for investments in digital health global goods.
Notice C1 is a one of the projects conducted in Digital Square since 2018. It includes 3 smaller programs: DHIS2 as an analytics, reporting, and visualization solution for openIMIS, Develop a claim submission, enrollment, and enrollment verification module with a clinical point of service application using the relevant HL7 FHIR standards, openIMIS, and OpenMRS and Integrating openIMIS with Bahmni: a Nepal-based proof-of-concept project.
In 2019, Digital Square announced the opportunity to participate in a new grant for the second part of Notice C1. In auction started 8 companies from the whole world with different offers. SolDevelo for years participates in several projects and auctions supporting OpenMRS and OpenIMIS functionality. They are also one of the companies which have significant share in creating these open-source programs. As the SolDevelo developers have experience in working with OpenIMIS and OpenMRS code, they decided to participate in the auction. In collaboration with Swiss TPH, companies won the grant and could start working on adding a new module and functions to programs. (You can read a concept note of Notice C on Digital Square page here).
OpenMRS is an open-source medical record system built for developing countries with limited access to energy power and Internet connection. It works in faraway regions and is used for saving all medical documentation’s patients since 2004. OpenIMIS is the open-source Insurance Management System, also built for healthcare in remote regions of the world. It was designed by the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institue (Swiss TPH) and first implemented in 2012 in Tanzania. Both of the programs work as the open-source and are regularly improve by their communities. OpenMRS and OpenIMIS have a big impact on helping people and offering them primary medical care. If you are interested in this topic we write some posts about them on our blog SolDevelo Foundation.
Companies had to build the working integration between openIMIS and OpenMRS to develop claim submission, enrollment, and verification module using the relevant HL7 FHIR standards. In short, the module is responsible for checking patient insurance enrollment on registration (in external Insurance Management Information System) status and submitting claims (managing patient billing).
Developers had a lot to do because work has to be done on both sides. “On the OpenMRS side, we added a module that will be responsible for checking patient insurance enrollment on registration and managing patient billing. An interface responsible for recording patient visits (form entry) will also need to be extended to support billing details. The module will also provide its own interface that will give a billing/claim overview. It will depend on the existing OpenMRS FHIR module – it will leverage it to act as an FHIR client that will communicate with openIMIS. The new module will also allow configuring connection details through an admin interface. On the openIMIS side, we implemented a module acting as an FHIR server. We used the open-source implementation of FHIR STU3 for .NET. The module will be responsible for exposing the relevant FHIR resources and mapping them to domain objects.” – https://applications.digitalsquare.io/notice-c/concept-note/55
It sounds like a big thing which helps everybody who works on OpenMRS. We hope that it will be an important change for all the staff who work there and by using our new module they save time and optimize their work.
The works on the project lasted for some time and a few weeks ago developers ended all work. The new module is ready for tests and in a few more weeks it should be ready to use in local clinics and hospitals. We can’t wait when we release it to the public.
Also, you can read more information about the projects on these sites: https://www.openimis.org/ and https://openmrs.org/.
