Building Healthcare/ Medical solutions on top of Open source ERP. opportunities, options, and requirements.
Developing from scratch is a nightmare for IT unexperienced personals, It's not easy require experience to manage till the end product, and often very risky in matter of handling resources and financial aspects till reaching the end goal with usable solution. In Healthcare sector there are many attempts from business owners in healthcare private sector to build their own solutions which they assume it's difficult to find in the market, So they invest and at the end the ambitious project turns into a disaster.
The answer for that as I see as a I witness many failed attempts to start from scratch is : Building on top of a usable community powered stable Solution. As Open source ERP solutions.
So what are ERP solutions?
ERP stands for " Enterprise Resource Planning ", which is a platform or solution aiming to handle and manage and automate all of the aspects of the major business processes as HR, manufacturing, supply chain, services, procurement, finance and other processes. ERP is built to provide the tool to run all the current processes in one place as well as be able to extend with new features regarding to the business requirements. As a platform it focuses on modularity, integration with other solutions and services, and it's built to be extended with custom requirements.
Features of ERP. What are ERP solutions can provide for healthcare providers?
Most of the ERP solutions are aiming to handle the major common processes in most of the business cases. It's ideal for corporates, big and medium sized companies. But what are the features/ modules required in most cases of Healthcare services :
- Inventory & Stock Management
- Human resources
- Communications
- Finance & Accounting
- Orders.
- Payments.
- Reporting
Many of ERP solutions provides a communication layer/ module, logging features, Analytics tools. But All of those features are extendable through the ERP marketplace.
Benefits of building your solution on top of ERP
- Security
As a platform aiming to manage and automate different processes in work, ERP solutions are built on top security standards. Which provides safe environment for developer to build their applications, extensions or modules on top of it.
- Support
○ ERP solutions/ Platforms are often supported by powerful community of developers and advanced users, and that makes it easier to find developers nearby.
- Modularity
It's built to be modular for fulfill the custom business requirements of the companies.
- Upgrades
Upgrades are critical benefit for developing solutions on top of ERP platforms, where core development teams are responsible for upgrades and modules/ and extensions developers are focusing on their product.
- Integration
Most of ERP solutions are built to integrate with many daily use solutions and application. There are many ERP modules built by developers to integrate ERP solution with other services and solutions.
Building Medical and Healthcare apps over ERP platforms, give the developer to focus on the process and their usability of the their solution rather than worrying on the most basic development flow and user process, security, authentications, configurations and of course the data presentation. Good usable ERP platforms and solution which is focusing on usability are built to provide the developers with the tools to develop and use their applications and modules with ease.
Is there any Medical or Healthcare related Project Built on ERP platforms?
Yes, it has been done before. Several times in fact, SAP one of the most usable and trusted commercial ERP platform has been targeting healthcare sector for several years. Odoo which is a free Open-source ERP solution has many medical and healthcare applications are available in the marketplace , The new emerging ERP : ERPNext has an elementary yet powerful HIS/ EMR port " SmarteHIS " , we didn't have the chance to test it yet.
Requirements for building on top of open-source ERP solutions.
- Stay close to the community.
- Make a list of available developers. In your area.
- Find commercial support close to you.
Top Open-source ERP solutions.
- ERPNext
- Odoo
- InoIdeas
- Tryton: Was used as code base to build GnuHealth
- Dolibarr: Was used to build Dolimed EMR
