mUzima is designed as a secure mobile health (mHealth) extension of OpenMRS. OpenMRS is a leading open-source electronic medical record (EMR) system that is deployed nationally in several countries including Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique. The figure below demonstrates the mUzima-OpenMRS connection.

mUzima provides an intuitive user interface for accessing OpenMRS features on the Android mobile platform, thus offering better user experience when compared to accessing OpenMRS directly via mobile web browser. In addition, mUzima is tailored to efficiently retrieve and store needed data from OpenMRS, and allow access to this data without requiring connectivity to the OpenMRS server (i.e. mUzima works fully in an offline model).

mUzima achieves this seamless interoperability with OpenMRS as follows:

• mUzima uses login credentials and permissions for users available on the OpenMRS platform.
• Once authenticated against OpenMRS, a user of mUzima can access the following data contained in the OpenMRS instance:
  • Patient demographics and patient attributes.
  • Patient groups or cohorts that are set up within OpenMRS.
  • Patient historical data comprising clinical encounter data and observations.
  • List of health providers stored in OpenMRS.
  • Concept dictionary elements used to capture clinical observations.
  • Lists of health facilities stored in OpenMRS.
• Data collected in mUzima is securely transferred and stored in OpenMRS database.
• mUzima uses the Concept dictionary available in the OpenMRS instance.