Can DHIS2 tracker act as EMR?

[Gassim (AL-Gassim Sharaf Addin)]

Welcome to the DHIS2 Community @A_Hasan!

This question has been asked previously and discussed in another topic post so I will quote the responses and close this topic post. If you have further questions please continue the discussion here: DHIS2 can be use as a Hospital business system?

@SamuelJohnson

It depends what you mean by “business system”. DHIS2 was originally designed as a generic management information system, so you could easily expand the scope of data captured to include HR, financial and stock data, for example. But this would still just be summary/aggregate data, for management purposes. DHIS2 wasn’t intended to be used as an operational system (ie managing day-to-day patient care at the point-of-delivery), so things like prescribing were definitely out-of-scope.

Since then, DHIS2 has been expanded to include Event Capture and Trackers, which do allow you to collect some operational and patient-level information for specific purposes if needed. But Trackers are much simpler and more limited than Electronic Medical Records (EMR) or e-prescribing systems, so it really depends on the complexity of your operations. For example, if you’re running an ART dispensary with a limited range of medicines, it could be quite feasible to create a DHIS2 Tracker to manage simple prescriptions; but if you’re running a pharmacy that stocks the full range of medicines used in a district hospital, and which receives prescriptions from all over the hospital, then you’ll probably need a much more powerful, feature-rich EMR or e-prescribing system.

@mike

Sam’s answer was quite right. There are many places that have instead connected other hospital oriented systems like OpenMRS or Bahmni to DHIS2 in order to bring hospital data back to the HMIS, so that is one approach you could consider.