Announcing OpenSRP 2: the next gen digital health app

Peter Lubell-Doughtie

April 10, 2023

Ona is excited to announce the next version of OpenSRP, a Global Good for Health. The culmination of three years of work, OpenSRP 2 is a FHIR-native digital health app that supports the WHO Smart Guidelines.

A from scratch rewrite, it is built on top of Google’s Open Health Stack, including the Android FHIR SDK, which Ona is an active contributor to. OpenSRP 2 adds key new features that transform how digital health software is built and implemented:

Interoperability: OpenSRP 2 guarantees seamless data exchange between various healthcare systems, enabling improved communication and collaboration among providers, patients, and other stakeholders.
Customization: OpenSRP 2 allows organizations to easily tailor the user interface, features, and workflows to their unique needs, resulting in a more efficient development process and user-friendly experience.
Scalability: OpenSRP 2 is expandable to include additional FHIR resources, functionality, or integrations as the organization’s needs evolve, making it a future-proof solution.
Reduced development time: By leveraging FHIR standards and pre-built components, OpenSRP 2 reduces the time and resources required for development, testing, and deployment.
Cost-effectiveness: OpenSRP 2 reduces costs by eliminating the need for custom-built solutions or expensive integrations, resulting in long-term savings for healthcare organizations.
Data consistency: OpenSRP 2 ensures data is stored and exchanged in a standardized format, improving data quality and consistency across various systems.
Improved patient engagement: OpenSRP 2 provides patients with better access to their health data, enabling them to make more informed decisions about their care and fostering a more collaborative relationship with their healthcare providers.
Easier maintenance and updates: OpenSRP 2 makes it easier to maintain and update the software, as changes can be made to the configuration without altering the core codebase.
Regulatory compliance: FHIR standards comply with regional and international healthcare regulations, ensuring health apps meet necessary requirements.
Community support: FHIR has a large and active community of developers and healthcare professionals who can provide support, resources, and their knowledge on best practices.

We are grateful for the generous support this work has received from the Patrick J McGovern Foundation, Last Mile Health, D-tree, PATH, Google, and the WHO. Technical documentation for OpenSRP 2 is available here. Please reach out to us on Zulip, Slack, or over email, info@smartregister.org, to discuss how your projects can benefit from FHIR based health data collection.

OpenSRP v1 support

OpenSRP v1 is a reliable, trusted platform in active use at national scale in several countries. It has been successfully adopted and implemented by a network of technical implementor’s without Ona’s involvement. As an open source project, this is something we are very proud of.

As the lead technical maintainer of OpenSRP, Ona will be ending our active development on OpenSRP v1 at the end of this year (Dec 31st, 2023) to allow our team to devote our full attention to OpenSRP 2. OpenSRP v1 will continue to remain available under the open source Apache 2.0 license for anyone to use and improve. As an organization, Ona will no longer be performing updates related to security or Android version increases related to maintaining the platform. If you are considering a new project with OpenSRP, we highly recommend you consider adopting OpenSRP 2. Please contact us if you have questions or need help with this. If you are currently using OpenSRP v1, we recommend you consider migrating to OpenSRP 2 in the long run if your project allows it. Reach out to info@smartregister.org for information on what this transition requires.

We believe OpenSRP 2 represents a major step forward in digital health. We are excited to be able to share it with you and create positive impact together.