Bahmni is developed jointly by resources that our coalition members provide us and contributions from our community members. The Bahmni Coalition sets the general direction for Bahmni for a one to two year period where we concentrate the coalition efforts. We receive feedback/feature requests when you add feature requests in Trello, you post a request in our discussion forum, report an issue in JIRA, and also when we talk to different stakeholders all year round. Based on the inputs we receive we create a high-level product goals wishlist which is discussed and prioritised by the Bahmni Coalition members.
We refresh/review our goals once a year and the process starts at the beginning of every year, typical in April. See below our goals for 2020 - 21.
At the same time, this is no means everything that we will do. Various projects are working on features which they have committed to contribute to the project. This, hopefully, will be the least we will do.
Goals for 2020 - 21
GOAL 1: ENHANCED LOCALISATION
Bahmni is designed as an internationalize solution. However, there are still plenty of gaps for localization while adapting the solutions for a specific region/language. As Bahmni rapidly spreads across geographies, this is an area which we want to focus on. Some of the areas which we will be working on are
- Some parts of the user interface are not reflective of the user’s selected languages.
- Not all metadata have direct support for localization. For example, attributes of patient, providers, programs etc, Identifier types, Visit/Encounter types, Address etc
- Referenceable data e.g. lab tests, radiology tests or other orderable, are not synchronized to Lab & ERP components for all supported languages.
- Missing internationalization support in parts of modules/app/functions, e.g. labels, texts, logs etc
GOAL 2: IMPROVED ACCESS CONTROL
Why: Bahmni’s EMR and Reporting frontend relies on underlying OpenMRS platform’s ACL model, which is defined by roles of a user, determining her privileges, and thereby her access to features and functions of Bahmni. In many parts of the application, there is either all or nothing approach to access control.
What we propose to do: Privacy by default - we want to adopt such philosophy in our designs, and incrementally bring in access controls at all levels, starting with access to forms, dashboards, programs, reports.
Bahmni’s generation 1 form technology (aka Forms1, ConceptSetUI), was based on conventions, made flexible through configurations and served us well. However, it had become pliable and extremely difficult to maintain. These forms also raised other issues like data model and performance (especially for large forms). For the last few years, we have invested in Forms 2.0, reimagined reusable components with React, and a “visual” WYSIWYG form builder. Forms can now be scripted, internationalized, versioned, imported and exported, with a huge leap in terms of performance. This has enabled implementers to design forms quickly and easily. However, there are lots of gaps and desired features that remain for e.g
- Bringing feature parity with Forms1, so that any form can be effectively designed in Forms2 alone.
- Bringing ability for forms to act, as not just observation forms, but of different types of information. e.g. Condition, Complaints, Order etc.
- Ability to fetch past captured data, history, complex conditional logic
- Better eventing and scripting support
GOAL 4: BETTER USER INTERFACE FOR CLINICIANS
-Orders: Simply search and select, rather than browse and select
-Prescription: Default values to populate for each drug(dose, drug units, frequency, duration etc.)
GOAL 5: ODOO VERSION UPGRADE
Odoo is a significant component of Bahmni, and used for a wide variety of Hospital operations and resource management - for pharmacy, billing, managing inventory/stocks, pricing, discounts. Bahmni v0.92 currently uses Odoo 10, which is built over Python 2.7. Python 2.7 already saw end-of-life in January 2020. This has already made our life difficult, as libraries are getting irrelevant, missing/disappearing, or references taken off etc. With passing time, this is only going to be more and more difficult and the onus of maintenance will come to Bahmni, not just for the Bahmni specific integration to Odoo, but also for python dependency maintenance.