SENAITE + FHIR: status update and roadmap?

Functional Questions and Answers
1

Hello SENAITE Community!

Happy to join and meet you all.

Some background first:
I represent a core contributing organisation to OpenMRS, the open source EMR system, and we are currently heavily involved in pushing forward the roadmap of the new OpenMRS 3.0.

Long story short, part of our roadmap consists in integrating OpenMRS with a LIMS… with FHIR messages. My understanding is that at this juncture, and looking at the landscape of open source LIMS, only OpenELIS Global speaks FHIR (more here on that)… I have seen this proposal:

However I believe that this DS grant was unfortunately not awarded, so in a nutshell my question is: what is the status of FHIR-zing SENAITE? Is there any plan to make it run on top/alongside a HAPI FHIR server? … etc etc.

Happy to discuss this with maintainers involved with the topic.

All the best.
- Dimitri

P.S. Tagging a couple of maintainers, sorry about the noise here: @Espurna @xispa

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2

Hi @mksd and welcome!

I will try to answer your question, but it may not be the most accurate one…

As you saw, we did some research on HL7 (https://applications.digitalsquare.io/notice-c/concept-note/70) but it was never implemented.

The development of a HL7 FHIR interface to make a subset of resources as FHIR resources accessible through a FHIR API is a feature that can always be considered with the right resources. Of course that it will be welcomed if anyone wants to implement it.

To give you some background on how new features are developed: SENAITE is a project maintained by professional providers and the community, so new features are usually developed because:

  1. Clients invest on SENAITE to have the feature they require
  2. The maintainers invest in a feature under their own considerations
  3. Someone from the community PRs a feature (To be honest, this scenario is not very common)

This said, while some companies are sorting the idea of investing in an HL7 interface, right now there is not a plan that I know to implement a FHIR interface.

Companies that want to interface medical systems with SENAITE usually make use of SENAITE JSON API https://senaitejsonapi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

You can find some doctests here (https://github.com/senaite/senaite.jsonapi/tree/1.x/src/senaite/jsonapi/tests/doctests) in order to have a better understanding of the API.

I hope this explanation puts some light on your question.

Best regards,

3

Thanks a lot for your insights @Espurna.

I think what is going to happen for now is that we will design middleware messaging routes that fully support FHIR, that is to cater for LIMS that can take it.

But then… we will design last mile transformers FHIR ←→ SENAITE JSON for SENAITE. I mean, that’s the idea at this juncture, we will have to assess the actual overhead when we get closer to it.

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Hello, Can you set up this project?

5

Hi :wave:

Not sure what you meant by “set up” here. But anyway yes we did it and this is what powers the integration between an EMR system (OpenMRS 3) and SENAITE within Ozone HIS.

The transformation of FHIR payloads into SENAITE payloads and vice versa is done via Camel routes that you will find here: GitHub - mekomsolutions/eip-routes-senaite: Camel routes used by OpenMRS EIP Client project to integrate OpenMRS with SENAITE

Looping in @ruhanga as he’s been behind most of it. He’ll be answering your questions after you’ve gone through the READMEs.

Cc @xispa to your attn, hopefully you remember that I ran you through our vision for Ozone over a call a loooong time ago :slight_smile:
Hopefully this will lead to loads of interesting new digital health projects!

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6

Fantastic @mksd ! for sure Ozone HIS will lead to a lot of interest, not only for digital health projects, but for OpenMRS and SENAITE as well! Have not taken a look yet, but will do asap!

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7

Hi @mksd

Your OZONE project looks very impressive! and I agree w/ @xispa that it’s gonna heat up interest for SENAITE and OpenMRS as well.

Very interesting to try it out somehow.

btw why you choose Odoo as ERP systems instead of Tryton or Apache OFBiz? I’m wondering because we’re evaluating these options and it seems you already did that.

8

Thanks @toropok :pray:
We are running through the first release sprint now (latest update here on OpenMRS Talk). Clearly by year end, or at the very least for the OpenMRS Conference this January in Nigeria we will have a good beta, a release candidate or even a full release. Between now and then will be a good period to organise demo sessions with various groups, including those coming through the SENAITE community.

Re: the choice of Odoo

I think the first thing to say is that Ozone is not going to be limited to the default flavour that it is starting with now (OpenMRS 3 + SENAITE + Odoo + Superset). Not only will it keep expanding to add more components (high on the list are components to support telehealth in general and also RIS/PACS) but also will it offer various options for some of its components, and I think that Odoo is very susceptible to this. We are currently doing early spikes with ERPNext for instance.
The BI component is also very susceptible to this, we don’t envision a world where we push Superset as the BI tool for HMIS implementations, it will just be an option amongst others. There we are also lurking at GoodData.

There’s a couple of criteria though:

  • The component must be open-source.
  • It needs to support OAuth2/OIDC as part of its open-source offering.
  • (Ideally) it should have a proven track record if there are alternatives for the functions that it brings to Ozone HIS.

This is a wide subject certainly worth expanding on.

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9

Thank you for your answer. Your project is very interesting. I congratulate you very much.

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