An Applied Approach to Teach Hospital Information Systems Development Using an Open Source ERP Framework

AbstractThe objective of the paper is to represent an international pilot project to teach development of free and open source hospital Information systems at the national level using a live pre installed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System. We have developed live image with pre installed free and open source ERP framework -Tryton® (A fork of openERP®) and a free and open source health and hospital information system GNU Health® that supports electronic medical records (EMR) which is developed on top of the ERP framework as the second layer. We considered the two layer system as a domain specific application development framework for further agile development of information systems in the healthcare information technology area. Participants were health informatics professionals invited from ministry of health from selected developing countries to participate in the ERP training program at United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU- IIGH) to learn agile development of open source hospital information system based on the ERP concept to adopt the solution in public hospitals and clinics in their respective country. During three days extensive course, participants used a live image of pre installed ERP system and a cloud hosted ERP configured as a distributed clinical information system to support the training and they learned how to configure the solution in a practical and step by step procedure. We have evaluated the course including feedback from the participants through a questionnaire and interview. The result showed a great potential of live open source ERP tools to support the training. It is expected that the results can be used for improvement of development of the other courses in other universities and institutions especially for subjects covering implementation procedures and critical success factors of free and open source ERP framework adoption in hospitals and Health centers with more focus on rural areas