Bahmni (https://www.bahmni.org) is an open source Hospital Information System (HIS) and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) product led by the Bahmni Coalition (a group of companies and non-profit organizations that provide leadership to Bahmni). It is a project of the OpenMRS Foundation.
Bahmni’s mission is to provide sophisticated digital healthcare to improve patient care in such settings. We want to provide a high-quality, free, open source, comprehensive Health Information Management System (HIMS) solution that is comparable to the best tools available in high income countries.
Bahmni combines and enhances existing open source products into a single solution. It integrates:
OpenMRS for electronic medical records and patient management
OpenERP for inventory, billing, financial accounting
OpenELIS for laboratory management
Dcm4chee for DICOM and PACS
Bahmni improves healthcare delivery through efficient information management, so that decision-making is faster and more reliable across the organization; doctors are enabled to be more effective and accurate while providing care; administrators have the information they need real time.
The primary users of Bahmni are: Clinicians - physicians, dentists, pharmacists, physician assistants, field health workers, nurses Hospital Staff - Front desk, receptionists, scribes, billing and administrative staff, Pharmacy and Store managers Medical Technicians - Lab technicians, radiographers Hospital Administrators: To see facility level reports for clinical and operational decisions The end users of Bahmni are typically doctors, specialists, clinical and non-clinical staff at hospitals located in remote parts of the world, most of whom rarely use technology in their daily life. Bahmni was designed to be used by such users. Its configurable interface allows clinical users of different specialties to design forms to capture the data they need. Bahmni is also designed to be used by users in multiple languages.
Out-of-the-box in product: English, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Implementers can add additional languages.
Software Application
AGPL 3.0
A5 | A5 Electronic medical record systems
C11 | C11 Terminology and classification systems
D2 | D2 Data interchange and interoperability
A6 | A6 Laboratory information systems
A9 | A9 Telehealth systems
Bahmni has been in development since early 2013. It was piloted at the Jan Swasthya Sahyog (JSS) Hospital in Chhattisgarh, India in October 2013. It was introduced to the wider community at the OpenMRS conference in 2015. Since then, the adoption has been growing organically.
In a short span of 9 years, Bahmni has been chosen for national level rollout in Lesotho, Bangladesh, South Sudan, Cameroon and Tanzania by the ministries of health of these countries. The endTB project consortium, a group of well-respected global health organizations - Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Partners in Health (PIH) and Interactive Research and Development (IRD), chose Bahmni as the EMR for a large implementation trial for the new Tuberculosis (TB) drug regimen.
According to our best estimate, we have more than 500 known sites worldwide in over 50 countries using Bahmni. Over twenty million patient records have been managed via Bahmni.
Bahmni was designed for use in low-resource settings. Currently, it is used predominantly in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). Typical organizations that form Bahmni’s core user segments are: Large NGOs (e.g. MSF, Cure International), Country Ministries of Health (MoH) - for country-wide implementations, small and medium-sized for-profit and NGO hospitals and research institutes.
Bahmni is usually chosen as the EMR for healthcare institutions looking to digitize patient care because of the following advantages: It replaces much more inefficient paper records, its customizability (localization, calendar), integrations with other systems, strong reporting capabilities. Additionally, Bahmni is preferred over alternatives because it is easy to use, it is open source and has an active community behind it, including the much larger OpenMRS community.
Less commonly, Bahmni also replaces existing EMR implementations.
At the urging of India’s National Health Authority (NHA), the Bahmni community is building Bahmni Lite, a lightweight version of Bahmni more suited to OPD settings in small clinics. Bahmni Lite will also be cloud-native to take advantage of increasing internet connectivity and allow clinics to use Bahmni in “Software as a Service” mode for as little as USD 20 a month This will also reduce costs to implementers and allow for efficiencies of scale.
In 2021, Bahmni became the first (and to date, only) open source HMIS to be certified for all three milestones of India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) network. It is being considered as a strong option for ABDM roll-out in multiple states in India and has already been piloted in the state of Bihar.
Bahmni has been recognized as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) (https://digitalpublicgoods.net/registry/bahmni.html). It has also recently (September 2022) been listed in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Digital X Solution Catalogue (https://digitalx.undp.org/catalog_1.html).
ADX, CIEL, HL7 FHIR, ICD-10, ICD-11, ICD-9, LOINC, Other, SNOMED
Point of service
https://bahmni.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BAH/pages/2812969012/Architecture+Technical+Documentation
Issue Tracking URLhttps://bahmni.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BAH/pages/1645674497/Active+Bahmni+Initiatives+Projects
Troubleshooting URLhttps://bahmni.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BAH/pages/2392073/Implementer+s+Guide
User Guide URLhttps://bahmni.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BAH/pages/32014338/User+Guide
Bahmni has a diverse community. These comprise developers, implementers, medical professionals, health informatics professionals and users. Since the community is globally distributed, most communication is asynchronous. There are several different forums for community engagement.
Discussion Forums: Bahmni is one of the more active channels in the OpenMRS Talk discussion forum (https://talk.openmrs.org/c/software/bahmni/36). This is meant for community members to introduce themselves, discuss product features, share how they’re using Bahmni and to seek help or support from other community members.
Bahmni Slack: The Bahmni Slack channel (https://bahmni.slack.com) is meant for more ephemeral communication among active contributors to Bahmni. There are smaller channels that are meant for specific topics (e.g. relating to a particular initiative or product feature), but most discussions happen on the #community channel.
Product Architecture Team (PAT) Calls: The PAT calls which are scheduled weekly are a synchronous forum where the community gets together to discuss how the evolution of the Bahmni product. These calls are open for anyone to attend. The agenda for these calls are proposed by community members and are posted on the discussion forum and the Slack channel.
Additionally, there are training sessions conducted from time to time to help new community members understand Bahmni and get the most out of the product.
