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This is a work in progress. See https://talk.openmrs.org/t/service-provider-program-draft-definition-and-terms/12865 for the current status. |
OpenMRS encourages organizations and consultants to grow their business by becoming service providers of technical, implementation, and maintenance support of OpenMRS products. Implementers around the world consistently come to OpenMRS in search of expert help with their implementations. We've created an OpenMRS Service Provider program to begin offering a list of resources that are available for these implementers to contact directly in order to find an appropriate fit to meet their needs.
What Is A Service Provider?
OpenMRS Service Providers are organizations or consultants that will implement the OpenMRS Platform, OpenMRS Modules, and/or the OpenMRS Reference Application for another organization, such as Ministries of Health, NGO's, Implementing Partners, and more.
An organization that has the commitment and capacity to perform software development, advising, and/or implementation work using and promoting products in the OpenMRS ecosystem.
Why Are Service Providers an Important Part of the OpenMRS Ecosystem
Service Providers are an important part of the OpenMRS community ecosystem Facilitate
Increase implementation, development and local support capacity
Improve access to appropriate service providers for implementations
Develop a list of service providers who are familiar with OpenMRS and can support the OpenMRS platform and/or the Reference Application
Three classifications of Service Providers
Platform without Reference Application
Platform with Reference Application
Platform with a Distribution
Strengthen local economy through support for local or regional OpenMRS Service Providers
Ability to work with other OpenMRS and Reference Application service providers and partners
Increased need and visibility of service providers
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Why Use a Distribution?
There are two ways to start using OpenMRS, depending on your needs and available resources:
- By far the quickest is to start from an existing OpenMRS Distribution, and configure that distribution for your implementation use case. Depending on which distribution you choose, and what your use case is, this may range from configuring metadata through a user interface to writing custom add-on modules.
- The alternative to using an existing distribution is for those projects with a strong development shop, they may choose to build their own custom application(s) on top of the Platform. However, in order to leverage the great work done in the community so far, we recommend exploring the distributions below to see if one is a good fit, and contacting the distribution owners for possible collaborations if customization is needed.
Some of the advantages to using a distribution that already exists are:
- Leverage work that has already been done to address workflows (Hospital Management, etc), regional needs (Kenya, Mozambique, etc), and specialty service areas (TB, etc)
- Collaboration opportunities with other developers and implementers working on similar use cases
- A broader user base of the same distribution can lead to improved code quality, additional features, and shared QA work
Types of Distributions
1. General Purpose Distributions
An OpenMRS distribution that intends to serve the worldwide audience of clinics, hospitals, governments, NGOs, etc, who want a patient medical record for purposes of clinical care.
2. Targeted Distributions
An OpenMRS distribution that is intended for a specific clinical or geographical use case, or a non-patient-care use case. For example, a standardized country specific distribution or one targeted at a specific disease epidemic.
3. Implementation Specific Distributions
A configuration of OpenMRS that is technically built like a Distribution, but is only intended for use by one specific consumer. If you are not the specific target of this distribution, you wouldn't probably use it directly, but as a developer or implementer you may learn a lot from studying or forking it. However, there may be opportunities to collaborate with the teams working on these distributions if you wanted to create a replica of their clinical and technical environments.
List of OpenMRS Distributions
General Purpose and Targeted Distributions
| Distribution | Type | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
 | OpenMRS Reference Application | General Purpose | Maintained by the OpenMRS community, this distribution demonstrates how the platform's capabilities can be used to build an EMR. You could use this out-of-the-box as a facility EMR, but it (currently) doesn't have the complete EMR feature set. |
| Bahmni | General Purpose - Hospitals and Large Clinics | Maintained by ThoughtWorks and the Bahmni community, Bahmni is an out-of-the-box EMR and Hospital Information System that can be configured without programming. | |
 | eSaude | Targeted - Mozambique | Developed by the Mozambique regional OpenMRS community, eSaude. A tailored distribution of OpenMRS to provide point of care clinical patient registration and healthcare workflows on tablets for the MOH public health facilities. Learn more... |
 | Kenya EMR | Targeted - Kenya | Developed by I-TECH, KenyaEMR is a tailored distribution of OpenMRS which meets the requirements laid out in the Kenya Ministry of Health document: 2011 Kenya EMR Standards and Guidelines. |
 | UgandaEMR | Targeted - Uganda | UgandaEMR is the custom implementation of OpenMRS in Uganda which is mandated by the Ministry of Health. |
Other Distributions
- CHITS is a targeted distribution for Philippine primary care centers, based on the older OpenMRS 1.8 platform
- PIH-EMR is an implementation-specific distro deployed by Partner In Health
- UP Health Service (UPHS) is an implementation-specific fork of CHITS
Planned Distribitions
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Types of Service Providers
List of Service Providers
| Distribution | Type | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| LOGO |
FAQ
Can I add my distribution to this page?
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- be based on a currently-supported version of the OpenMRS Platform
- works leveraging the platform APIs, not just sharing the data model
- include instructions to install and upgrade it as a unit
- be actively supported.
- At a minimum, one person available via some electronic format (email, skype, IRC, etc) and with the contact listed on the Distributions wiki page.
- have an open-source license and publicly-hosted code
If these criteria are met, and you want to share your work with others, please post to this Talk category and tag your post with "distributions", edit this wiki page directly, or reach out to Darius Jazayeri and Jan Flowers.
What type is my Distribution?
...