Introduction

As we embark on a new year, we look forward to inputs from the Bahmni community, with regards to priorities and initiatives that Bahmni core team members should focus on. This document provides context on the year gone (2023), the initiatives and happenings to help put things in perspective. For 2024, we would like to continue on the major initiatives / goals from 2023, and also get guidance and inputs from the community on other initiatives that they feel are high priority for them, and should be considered.

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1. Bahmni Standard v1.0 Release: Bahmni Standard v1.0 has not yet been released, although it is available for preview. We want to club the Odoo-v16 upgrade, any critical security fixes, performance testing and multi-locate locale support, before doing a Bahmni Standard (for Large Hospitals) release.

2. Bahmni IPD Release: Merge and release a comprehensive IPD release (based on the work being done for CURE International), based on the work started in early 2023. In-patient Department features like Drug Chart / MAR, Ward Summary, Nursing Care Dashboard, Task List, Discharge Summary, etc are in-development and soon to be deployed across multiple hospitals in CURE, and we would like this work to be merged into Bahmni, and available on our demo servers, and to the community. Read more about this here: Bahmni IPD Active Development

3. Better UX for Clinicians: Provide a more user-friendly, mobile-first experience to Clinicians (Patient Search, Dashboard, Consultation, Orders/Investigations, View Documents, Appointments, etc) on mobile, likely built using Flutter. Also uplift the web experience to use the new React micro-frontend architecture, so that clinicians can use the app more effectively on the go.

4. Help existing Bahmni adopters to upgrade to latest version of Bahmni: A ton of new features, bug fixes, interoperability support has gone into Bahmni in the last 2-3 years. We want most of the Bahmni adopters who are still using v0.91/0.92/0.93 to immediately create plans for moving to latest version of Bahmni --- so they are decoupled from CentOS, and have a stronger / better supported / more stable version of Bahmni. Our Community Support channels are active and helping existing organisations prepare for this migration. Don’t miss out!

5. Prototype how GenAI / LLMs / OpenAI can improve Bahmni adoption and User Experience: We want to experiment with LLMs to help improve Bahmni user-experience / development / adoption / evaluation use-cases. Some experiments were conducted last year, where Thoughtworks loaded Bahmni Wiki into an LLM, to create a Bahmni chatbot for implementation / support queries. We wish to see if there are more impactful use-cases like Consultation Notes → Structured Text, OCR, etc. More ideas needed here.

6. Extend interoperability through wider FHIR / OpenHIE support: Bahmni already has significant support for FHIR and Open Standards. Read more here. But, as OpenHIE and ABDM standards evolve, we need to keep up.

7. Upgrades / Security Fixes: Update Java version, OpenELIS libraries, DCM4chee, MySQL / Postgres, etc – to ensure stability, performance and security.

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1. Patient Portal / Mobile App for better Patient experience (e.g Book Appointments, Teleconsultation, View Clinical Notes, Orders, etc).

2. Comprehensive Security Posture and Plan for Bahmni including Single Sign-on

3. Stronger support for AWS / GCP / Public Cloud including Docker Swarm (besides the Docker container approach which is already supported across cloud providers)

4. Bahmni Outreach (out-of-box version): Ensure the Bahmni Outreach Community Healthcase (offline-ready) app is easy to use out-of-the-box while requiring minimal customization / code changes, for rapid rollouts.

5. Multi-tenancy for low-cost SaaS offerings:OpenMRS currently is single tenant (with dedicated DB per facility). While this increases security, it becomes costly for SaaS providers to host one instance of OpenMRS per clinic. With Multi-tenancy, the same OpenMRS/Bahmni instance should be able to support multiple clinics (20x), which will reduce operational overhead and bring down hardware costs.

6. Oncology Version of Bahmni

7. BikaLIMS / Senaite LIMS Integration out-of-the-box. Read more here.

8. Better Episode-of-Care Management

9. Better Patient Document Management

10. Split Screen view for Clinical Dashboards

11. Speech-to-Text for Clinicians

12. Faster Navigation / Universal Search / Speech Search and other related ideas

13. Patient De-duplication or duplication registration detection

14. Doctor Notification for Patient Lab Results, Events, etc.

15. Rich Text and Template support for Consultation Notes, Discharge Summary, etc.

16. Triage, Internal Referrals and Consultations

17. More robust user-experience for Patient Tele-consultation