Bika Health in Open Source HMIS integration at the Dr. Akbar Niazi Teaching Hospital, Islamabad
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Lemoene, 28 December 2018
GNU Health was customised to include Billing, Emergencies, Blood Bank and HR improvements, and to Bika Health, a new COA template, custom results interpretations, and a serial interface for the Haematology Analyzer (Sysmex XP-100) were added. The latter is an exciting development towards ongoing Bika Froidian dream, Free Open Instrument Middleware, as more users have been adding serial interfaces to Bika recently. It hangs ever lower after refinements in Bika’s Restful API, which Khurram used for bidirectional interfacing Tryton and GnuHealth as well. Expect news soon on how the API is being used in Bika’s next level evolution, employing the API for a JS UI, with big improvements in performance. At peak, the DANT hospital lab handles 300 samples per week, about 6000 Analyses, in Haematology, Biochemistry, Histopathology and Microbiology. In Histopathology, biopsies are analysed for cancer, and Hepatitis, Malaria, Dengue, Typhoid etc. in Haematology. Apart from the full range of Microbio Culture and Sensitivity for drug resistance testing, the Biochem analysis services portfolio includes Renal and Liver function, Lipid Profile and Alanine Aminotransferase tests.
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A feasibility study included GNUHealth, Bika and Orthanc demonstration installations and presentations to doctors from every specialty and Tryton ERP to hospital support staff. Reasonable regional HMIS implementation cost can be rounded to $100,000 before including Support and Customisations. The DANT team was given the goal to save this and develop a solution comprising of open-source components which could be customised to inhouse requirements. In 6 months. The critical ERP LIMS interface and Outpatient Billing customisation was completed, the users trained and the systems taken into production. Over the rest of 2017 interfacing was completed, customisations to GNUHealth and further configuration continued, ERP inventory and HR, many more Analysis Services and Profiles in Bika. Also more customisations towards Inpatient Billing and much desired Analysis Specifications per Patient gender and age pushed from the EMR. Performance tuning and Load Balancing were being monitored and tweaked throughout towards High Availability goals. The Bika installation includes six client Instances behind a proxy running on a 64-GB RAM, hexa-core Ubuntu Server. Performance was boosted by increasing the number of ZEO Clients. Khurram is a certified Java Programmer with experience of large data sets in Oracle and took 3 months to ramp up and into Python. The project was completed in a team of two developers with network and systems support. The project succeeded with the help of online knowledge and user forums. |
