OpenMRS Reference Application Distribution

Goal & Philosophy

The OpenMRS Reference Application distro demonstrates how the OpenMRS platform can be used to build a facility EMR, and is where the community develops starter sets of metadata and terminology. The Reference Application is a good starting point for implementing OpenMRS in a facility, and it intends to eventually be a full-featured EMR system, but it is dependent on distributed volunteer efforts, and hasn't yet achieved that goal.

This distribution does not intend to cover the entire Hospital Information System use case, e.g. we won't cover billing or pharmacy stock management. (Others are welcome to eventually provide this functionality via add-on modules.)

Target Usage

Implementers can use the OpenMRS Reference Application Distro as the starting point of a facility EMR, further customizing it with HTML Form and/or XForms. Developers may do further customization via additional modules.

Implementers with developer capacity can reuse the building block components of the Reference Application Distro to build their own custom distribution.

Developers and implementers can use the metadata and terminology in the Reference Application Distro (e.g. allergen lists, drug order frequencies) as the basis for their own implementations.

Developers can build modules that plug new functionality into the Reference Application Distro as a way to share their work broadly across the OpenMRS community.