The UCSF Health Informatics Hub recently hosted the OpenMRS Outpatient Department (OPD) Convergence Workshop in Mombasa, Kenya. Over five days, UCSF, OpenMRS and various participants worked closely together to expand the OpenMRS Reference Application (RefApp) to digitize the outpatient department (OPD) for better healthcare delivery.

OpenMRS is an open source electronic medical record platform that is used and maintained by a global community. The RefApp has evolved to support various medical services as well and OpenMRS has been used to track and monitor PEPFAR-supported HIV care.

The workshop included diverse participants from the Ministry of Health Kenya, CDC Kenya, Palladium, MEKOM, LVCT Health, CIHEB, OpenMRS, Makerere University School of Public Health, University of Nairobi and UCSF. Through presentations and hands-on sessions, attendees gained a better understanding of OPD workflows and challenges, focusing on where most patient-doctor interactions occur. Together, they identified key features needed to enhance the RefApp for OPD use.

Participants prioritized features based on their importance, relevance/generalizability, and feasibility, recognizing resource constraints. The team pulled features from KenyaEMR and UgandaEMR that can be potentially included in the RefApp.

Next, the team will build specific implementations of these features in the country by turning them into generic modules for integration into the RefApp. These modules can then be used and configured by countries as needed. It is expected that these features will make it into the RefApp by the end of September 2024.