Own the Stack
Evidence note 7 Back to paper

Bahmni's architecture — OpenMRS, Odoo, OpenELIS, and DCM4CHE

Source for how Bahmni composes existing open-source projects into a hospital-facing application.

Bahmni is not a from-scratch application. It uses OpenMRS as its clinical-data backend, Odoo (formerly OpenERP) for patient registration and hospital administration, OpenELIS for laboratory information management, and DCM4CHE for radiology and DICOM imaging, connected through an integration layer built on Atom feeds, HL7, and DICOM messaging. Each component is itself an independently maintained open-source project; Bahmni’s contribution is the integration and the clinical workflow built on top.

This composition is the reason Bahmni is described in the paper as “what OpenMRS becomes with a hospital wrapped around it” — it is a real architectural claim, not a metaphor.

Sources

  1. Bahmni, FAQ. The project’s own description of its component architecture and the open-source projects it integrates.