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 post a request in our discussion forum, create a ticket in JIRA, post a message on Slack, 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 Jan-April.  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 2021-23

GOAL 1: LIGHTWEIGHT VERSION OF BAHMNI FOR CLINICS

Provide a lightweight, secure, cloud ready version of Bahmni for Clinics & small Hospitals, so that facilities that are looking for a simple system for only EMR, Billing and Reporting needs can adopt Bahmni.

GOAL 2: INDIA READY

Given the strong focus on a digital public health strategy in India, make Bahmni ABDM ready and provide out-of-the-box packages for India-ready forms, drugs, tests, SNOMED/ICD-10 mappings, clinical terminology, etc. This will help in rapid adoption of Bahmni across India.

GOAL 3: SECURE AND SAFE

Harden Bahmni product and development security, along with guidelines for ensuring strong patient data privacy.

GOAL 4: INCREASE DOCTOR ADOPTION

In most Public Health settings, doctor time is a premium, with high patient loads. Bahmni aims to provide features that make it easy to accurately, safely and quickly capture clinician notes/orders/etc. by using templates, speech-to-text, OCR, shortcuts, etc.

GOAL 5: CLOUD FRIENDLY

Along with on-prem, also make Bahmni Cloud-friendly, to allow for Implementors to be able to scale/support multiple installations of Bahmni on the cloud, more easily.

GOAL 6: KEEP SOFTWARE COMPONENTS UP-TO-DATE

Upgrade out of legacy components, libraries and programming stacks. This will help keeping Bahmni secure, performant, easy to extend, and provide wider community support.

Goals for 2020-2021

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

1. Some parts of the user interface are not reflective of the user’s selected languages.
2. Not all metadata have direct support for localization. For example, attributes of patient, providers, programs etc, Identifier types, Visit/Encounter types, Address etc
3. Referenceable data e.g. lab tests, radiology tests or other orderable, are not synchronized to Lab & ERP components for all supported languages.
4. 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.

GOAL 3: IMPROVED FORM TECHNOLOGY

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

User experience has been one of the USPs of Bahmni though there have been some sore points. This goal aims to improve the usability of various modules in Bahmni and help users become more efficient. For e.g.:

• Improving prescription entry so as to reduce the number of clicks and typing required every time an order is written

• Improving the orders tab to reduce the scroll and easily find the required labs and radiology orders

• Printing of orders and prescription
• Checking for preexisting patient records during registration to avoid creation of duplicate patient records  

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.