Introducing ERPNext Healthcare

8 min readApr 5, 2021

— The most flexible Open Source HMS

A quick intro about us: We are Tacten LLP— a Bangalore-India based ERPNext partner company that offers full line of services around ERPNext and Frappe. We are a team of software developers and domain experts with an obsessive focus on helping our customers exceptionally succeed with ERPNext and Frappe. Our primary area of expertise are in the Manufacturing and Healthcare domain. We have the experience of implementing ERPNext to several domestic and international clients under our belt.

In this blog we will be looking at what are the OKRs (objectives and key results) that any Clinician team and hospital administration would be looking at as a success criteria for their HMS (Health Management System) implementations, and how ERPNext Healthcare stands out as clear winner in meeting those OKRs.

What are Care Givers looking for in an HMS?

Exceptional Patient Outcome — Enable the Care Giver to do their job best

You call your systems as blazing fast or zero downtimes or whatever performance parameter you want to define your HMS software with — but if your IT systems cannot cohesively work towards delivering consistent and exceptional patient care and outcomes — we are missing the mark as a leading HMS. Care giver collaborations, inter departmental integrations, hassle free patient record capturing and easy access of all historical patient records from any where, are some of the key enabling factors for a successful patient outcome.

Many studies have proven that the more time a clinician gets to spend with a patient, the chances of beneficial patient outcome is much more. That is exactly what an effective ERM solution can bring to the table — relieving the clinician from all repetitive and mundane operational activities, so that he or she can devote more time towards activities that entail actual care giving for the patient, hence elevating the standard of the Hospital reputation and good will with customers.

Other side to the coin,

What the Hospital Administrators are looking for —

Bring about exceptional ROI, freedom from vendor lock-ins, easy system adoption, maintainability, scalability, better streamlining of operations and inter-departmental system integrations, and effective MIS reports for management to make key day-to-day and periodic operational decision and other reporting needs for, donors, auditors, regulators and government departments.

A fully integrated HMS that allows for the data to flow right from registration to various service units and other departments like the lab, radiology, pharmacy and billing

From an admin standpoint these are some of the key takeaways in deciding on an HMS for the hospital.

Why ERPNext Healthcare can serve as the most exceptional HMS out there in the market?

Built off of Frappe Framework

The only batteries included 100% open source Web App framework that is currently available in the market — What this mean is — the base on which ERPNext Healthcare is built is on a web development framework called Frappe that comes with lot of modern and enterprise grade app features out-of-the-box. Features like -

User authentication and Highly granular Role based Authorisations — allows for user access restrictions and data privacy and integrity.
Workflows and Approvals (very handy for implementing business process flows for various user levels)
Schedulers and background jobs — that aids all sorts of automations requirements of a system
Modular and extensible — you can literally achieve any imaginable system integrations or workflows with the frappe and extend and reuse heavily all parts of the platform for more optimised code and cohesive usability of features we can build.
App, SMS and Email Notifications
Email configurations for sending and receiving emails
Other modern 3rd party REST api integrations — Google Drive, AWS S3, Razorpay, Stripe, Dropbox, Slack, SSO and LDAP etc
Website builder and web portal login and access features
Comes bundled with Rich UI and Single page Web app for all tables and modules in the system — UI with List, Kanban, Calendar, gnat charts view, quick entry etc.
Mobile responsive and availability on devices with many different form factors.
100% Cloud and off-line capabilities
Highly configurable and low code system
Database, cache, webserver and other scalable infra setup
File upload and download and much more

Of which #7 — Comes bundled with Rich UI is most unique feature of Frappe framework that makes it so attractive in comparison to other open source web app frameworks in the market.

Hence a modern cloud based platform using which one can achieve any imaginable web and app solutions and that can be comparable to any modern application platform like SalesForce or SAP Cloud.

Healthcare Module —

An EMR software that makes the lives of the Care Givers and Hospital Administration a breeze

The main piece to a HMS is the clinical and EMR (Electronic Medical Recording) system. The clinical features of ERPNext Healthcare are thoughtfully crafted keeping the care giver at the centre to make it most user friendly and at the same time without compromising the complexities involved in recording all aspects of patient records and the care giving needs.

Following are some the feature highlights of the Healthcare module

Patient Master Data — this feature tracks all data pertaining to a patient. The encounters, patient records, history, files and test results, billing, IP details and much more. Also supports file attachments to store PDFs, images and videos. No need for any 3rd party solution for document storage for patients

2. Healthcare Practitioners — Configure multiple practitioner details (like Doctors, Nurses, Lab Technicians etc). Practitioners can be assigned role permission for accessing areas of the ERM that they are authorised to access even to a very granular level. Also integrated with HR module of ERPNext for viewing their leaves, payroll, and other enterprise features.

3. Practitioner Schedule and Patient Appointments

ERPNext has rich features for scheduling the practitioners for different facilities and time-slots they are available, based on that the Patient Appointment booking calendar will show availability for booking the appointments.

4. Patient History

The patient history report allows of seeing the historical medical records of the patient in a single patient wall view with timelines and all drill down links to detailed view of the encounter or lab or procedure details

5. Reporting

Hospitals need to produce reports to regulatory authorities , donors, insurance payers, auditors and Government on periodic basis. Also the administration needs daily/monthly/quarterly data insights and MIS reports for making operational and management decisions.

ERPNext comes with very rich reporting and data visualisation capabilities and since the system is a fully integrated HMS extended from ERPNext core modules, we have a very cohesive, accurate and structured data model — so getting these reports are as simple as — either directly configuring it from the UI or writing small SQL scripts or for advanced analytics requirement we can even write python scripts for various aggregations and computations. Most of the standard reports for the hospital operations like checking stock level and stock replenishment reports, IPD reports like ALOS (Average Length of Stay), BOR (Bed Occupancy Rate) for the ward, also looking at which service is getting more used and customer demand hence the ability to plan the budgets rightly.

Other features:

Patient Encounter — the primary document for capturing the patient complaints, diagnosis, treatment, prescription and procedures
Lab, Radiology and procedure workflows
Support of International Standards like ICD-10 and SNOMED-CT: The data model for items are designed such that it can cater to any future standards that evolve over time
Prescription, print, email — integration with Printer and directly send email to patient from the system
Pharmacy and Stock modules
Billing and accounting
Healthcare service units — Highly configurable services units
In-patient workflows, with bed management and nursing care administrations.
Collaboration features like chats, emails, Google, Slack etc.
Device integrations — with Radiology and Lab devices
API based platform — allows for integrating any 3rd part system

An exceptional demo of ERPNext healthcare presented by Rucha Mahabal of ERPNext at the Healthcare Webinar hosted by www.ebapartners.net

It is not over yet, the best is kept for the last….

An extension of ERPNext to enable all enterprise features needed for the Hospital operations

ERPNext is the worlds best 100% open source ERP in the market, featured in the Gartner Quadrant among the Top ERPs in the market in terms of User Recommendation. It covers all most all lines of businesses and verticals from Retails, Manufacturing, Services, Not-for-Profit, Education and much more.

The team that built the Healthcare module thought it best to build the module extending other enterprise features of ERPNext. Thus the HMS comes with all other enterprise level operation requirements for running a healthcare facility. Unlike other point solutions that only has the ERM or any other specialised clinical function — with ERPNext healthcare you get the whole plethora of other features of ERPNext like, financial accounting, multi-company setup, MIS reporting, Dashboards with graphs and charts, excel downloadable reports, Chart-of-accounts, Multi-lingual and multi-regional support. Chats, emails, and much more

One caveat

ERPNext healthcare is still in its early stages evolving and many specialised clinical features that would be present in some mature HMSs might be still missing to some extend — but we don’t see that as a worry, and as would any open source enthusiast would see that as a benefit — since we can go out there and build those features anew without having to live with rigid implementations of the same that exists from ages in the market and the baggages attached to it.

Frappe framework is most suitable for rapid development and we are sure to see feature parity to soon catchup with any other market leading HMS, but this time with the modernity and coolness of the Frappe.

Conclusion

With all these great features and capabilities that the software brings to the table, there is no doubt that any hospital that gets ERPNext as their core HMS is a clear winner — hence resulting in more co-ordinated patient care and better patient outcomes, very optimised and streamlined hospital operations that integrates all aspects of both clinical side and the enterprise side of operations in a well integrated manner, thus facilitating for better decision making for the day-to-day operations (through the availability of realtime business reports and actionable data insights), overall running the hospital to be able to serve more patients and keeping the administration overheads minimum hence resulting in better profitability and happy everybody. 🤗

Click to know more about ERPNext Healthcare