Tamanu is an electronic medical record that provides a birth-to-death history of all patient encounters with the health system. We developed Tamanu to meet the five principles we consider imperative in low resource and remote settings:
- Free and open-source
- Desktop and mobile enabled out-of-the-box
- Seamless data exchange via HL7 FHIR compliant API, as well as interoperability with all major clinical data standards
- 100% offline functionality across desktop and mobile, with powerful syncing. Run offline for unlimited periods, with all data syncing in two directions when you come back online
- Highly secure to global standards
We also wanted Tamanu to have a modern, clean interface; to be intuitive for first-time users; and to meet nearly all clinical and public health use cases so that users didn’t need a different app for every single different clinical workflow.
Today, Tamanu is used in 6 countries around the world and tracks >10,000 clinical events every day.
Since we first went live with Tamanu in 2020 though, there had been 38 minor version upgrades and we’d reached Tamanu 1.38. Over that time, Tamanu changed completely – the big changes since our release included:
- Dozens of new features and improvements, supporting use from outreach clinics to tertiary hospitals
- Newer, more modern user interfaces
- Much greater stability
- A completely new sync engine, changing the way that data moves around and supporting use at scale
- Hugely improved (and much more granular) permissions model and a raft of security features
- Smarter data exchange using HL7 FHIR
- Report-builder
By the time we reached version 1.38, Tamanu was a completely different software to where we started – and then we introduced one of the biggest updates of all, releasing Tamanu as a web application in Chrome. This meant that Tamanu would be usable across Mac, PC and Linux machines (as well as on Android in a mobile version).
We therefore decided that it was time for Tamanu 2.0.
Our technical description of these changes is here: https://beyond-essential.slab.com/posts/tamanu-2-0-mchlk33i
Most importantly, Tamanu Desktop is now usable across any platform – Mac, PC and Linux – with no local software required except Chrome. It is more stable, more scalable, and has more features than ever before. Recent new features include:
- Program registries module
- Translation tool to seamlessly switch between languages
- FHIR-compliant International Patient Summary
- Improved Electronic Immunisation Register module
- Front-end report builder
For many people who haven’t seen Tamanu in a while, we invite you back to see it again. For new users, we invite you to get in touch and experience the best open-source EMR in the world.
An Electronic Medical Record like nothing you’ve seen before.
