Bahmni is an easy to use, complete, open source Hospital Information System (HIS) and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) that has been built
in the Global South to meet the needs of low resource environments. Bahmni is a distribution of the OpenMRS medical record platform, with a
user interface built from the ground up. It also supports Odoo (formerly OpenERP), OpenELIS, and dcm4chee, providing an integrated robust
solution that manages patient information in a flexible fashion through the care cycle, including registration, various points-of-care,
investigations, lab orders and results management, PACS and billing. Bahmni believes in “not reinventing the wheel” and leverages existing
open source products which are best of the breed for those functions. Bahmni is built in a modular fashion, enabling relevant components of
Bahmni to be chosen and integrated based on need.
To date, Bahmni has more than 30 implementations in over 20 countries, and several new implementations have started in the last year. Bahmni
fills an important gap in the global health IT space, as it is designed to be intuitive and simple to use at the point of care, requiring minimal
support. Bahmni is easy to deploy and implement, does not require custom software development to be usable. This combination of
functionality and limited need for technical implementation support has led to the rapid adoption of Bahmni in many countries and an evergrowing
interest in Bahmni. Currently, the governments of Bangladesh and Bhutan are in discussion to scale Bahmni nationally to all of their
public sector hospitals, and Tanzania is preparing for a similar scale-up.
Bahmni’s software and user base is mature, but its FOSS community is newly-formed, and still dependent on grant funding. Bahmni coalition
partners are growing their business models around the product, but the current level of contributions they can make to shared activities is not
enough to satisfy Bahmni’s stakeholders. This funding proposal will further consolidate and expand our core FOSS activities, giving coalition
partners room to grow their Bahmni work, which provides long-run resourcing to our shared efforts.