OpenHospital is a cross-platform Java-based HIS ( Hospital Information System ), originated from Italy, developed and maintained by Informatici Senza Frontiere a nonprofit organization aiming to utilize IT to help developing countries.
OpenHospital has about 23 operational installations in 13 countries, as it supports multiple languages including English, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Swahili, Dutch, and a few other languages. The new phase of OpenHospital localization is awaiting support from contributors to add support for more languages.
The current installations have a pretty good figure to how many patients they serve as listed in the main website ( +425k patients ), in Europe, Jordan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Greece, Burma, and many African countries as Uganda, Angola, Somalia, Congo, Tanzania and more.
OpenHospital was built by an Italian nonprofit organization: Informatici Senza Frontiere to be used at St. Luke's Hospital in Uganda, which itself was founded by Dr. Mario Marsiaj and his wife Claudia, in a remote small village with high population back in 2001. OpenHospital got its first pilot run, since then it has been installed in several countries around the world.
User-interface
It uses Java Swing, which may not feel native on desktops as Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX, but it works very well without any problem, The user-interface is quite simple and easy to use considering it's a hospital information system, comparing it to other HIS commercial or open source which they tend to occupy the full screen as demonstrate full control on the workflow within the interface which ends up complicating it. OpenHealth provides a simple menu to access everything.
Patient records management
OpenHospital was built out of necessity as it based on real requirement, so it classifies the patient records into in-patient and out-patient with multiple support modules under each including hospital wards management. Patients also have SMS reminder for their appointments and lab results.
Pharmacy module
Pharmacy module is one of the major features in OpenHospital as it integrates well with other modules as patient records, inventory, billing management, and cost tracking.
More features:
- Billing Management
- Laboratory module
- Internal Chat communication ( XMPP Communication (internal chat) )
- Extended modules: Malnutrition control management, Vaccines database, Pregnancy Management, Therapy management
- DICOM viewer that supports multiple modalities
- Reports & Statistics in PDF & Excel formats
- Users management (Multiuser / Multigroup)
Technical note
OpenHospital was built using Java and MySQL as the backend database for the system, which makes it cross-platform as its client works well on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. However, despite the lake of web and online documentation, there is PDF manuals for users, developers and admins, developers, and experienced technicians will be able to make it run with ease.