Background

KenyaEMR, developed by The Palladium Group (Kenya) with OpenMRS, is a national EMR system focused on HIV care and primary healthcare across over 1,800 facilities in Kenya. KenyaHMIS is a broader health management information system that aggregates data from KenyaEMR and other sources to support national health reporting and policy decisions. Together, KenyaEMR and KenyaHMIS provide patient-level data and broader public health insights essential for Kenya’s public digital health infrastructure.

Challenge

With Kenya's digital health landscape evolving rapidly, it became essential for KenyaEMR to expand beyond core EMR functions to remain a competitive and comprehensive solution. New capabilities like patient billing and broader clinic management features were needed to better support healthcare facilities. Additionally, ERPNext, an increasingly popular open-source ERP, offered a promising option for meeting these expanded needs within the digital health ecosystem.

Solution: Turn KenyaEMR into an Ozone distribution with ERPNext as its ERP app

To enhance KenyaEMR’s functionality, ERPNext was integrated with OpenMRS within KenyaEMR, leveraging the Ozone platform. This effort involved two angles: first, reorganizing KenyaEMR’s code and packaging structure to align with Ozone’s standards, and second, updating Ozone to allow ERPNext as an ERP option alongside its default, Odoo.

Take-away #1: Ozone is Built for Easy Expansion

Ozone’s design supports straightforward integration of new apps through ongoing projects. While not all apps join the official ecosystem, adding functionality is always seamless. With ERPNext, we easily adapted existing data flows from Odoo, showcasing how Ozone enables alternative options for ecosystem apps. Although ERPNext’s long-term role in the ecosystem is uncertain, this project with Palladium demonstrated Ozone’s flexibility in integrating new solutions.

Take-away #2: Ozone Standards Benefit Every OpenMRS-based Distribution

A valuable outcome of this project was KenyaEMR’s transformation into an Ozone distribution, aligning it with Ozone’s robust standards. These include standard Maven practices and best practices for master data management. Ozone ensures a clear separation of master data from transactional data, integrating master data into software configuration. This refactoring work streamlined KenyaEMR’s packaging and release process, setting a foundation for smoother ongoing maintenance.

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