A Mature API for an Electronic Health Record: the OpenMRS Process

By some measures, OpenMRS may be the most successful of the open source EHRs, widely deployed around the world. It also has a long experience with its API, which has been developed and refined over the last several years. I talked to OpenMRS developer Wyclif Luyima recently and looked at OpenMRS’s REST API documentation to see what the API offers...

OpenMRS offers some advanced features, such as the ability to add patients to “cohorts.” This is helpful in tracking epidemics or identifying patients who may be candidates for a research study. The RESTful API is not the only way to interact with OpenMRS. The API is built on top of the underlying Java API, which developers also use. The Java API (and in the future, the RESTful API as well) lets you can define a “program” for a patient, assign “workflows” to a program, and define “states” through which a workflow passes...

As a global open source community, the OpenMRS project has hundreds of worldwide contributors and API users. Its documentation is supplemented by OpenMRS Talk, an online forum for project planning and support. The modular architecture allows new features to be plugged in, like FireFox plugins or Chrome extensions. Third-party mobile apps have begun to appear, with the OpenMRS community actively developing Android and iOS apps...