Open-source healthcare management.
The Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS) encodes 40+ years of clinical and administrative workflow knowledge for the Indian Health Service. This site distills those patterns — the domain model, workflows, architecture, and security model — into open, reusable knowledge for anyone building health systems.
Not a transcription of MUMPS globals. An opinionated extraction of the ideas worth carrying forward.
What's here
Domain Model
Core healthcare entities — Patient, Encounter, Order, Problem, Result — distilled from decades of operational use.
System Architecture
Four-layer model, infrastructure stack, decentralized-by-design federation pattern, and standards governance.
Clinical Workflows
Pre-visit prep, encounter-at-arrival, cohort query at point of care, and external clinical decision support.
Administrative Workflows
Registration, credentialing, billing, and resource management as first-class domain operations.
Security Patterns
Kernel-based access control, audit trails, e-prescribing of controlled substances, and user security auditing.
Application Catalog
All 70+ RPMS modules organized by domain — Clinical, Administrative, Infrastructure — with namespace codes.
Why this exists
RPMS serves one of the most underserved patient populations in the United States. It has done so reliably for decades, in low-bandwidth, resource-constrained environments, at facilities ranging from a two-room rural clinic to a 200-bed area hospital.
The implementation — MUMPS globals, VAX-era conventions, terminal-based interfaces — is not what's valuable. The operational knowledge embedded in the design is.
This site is an attempt to extract that knowledge: the domain model, the workflow patterns, the security architecture, the hard-won decisions about what healthcare IT actually needs to do under pressure. The goal is to make those patterns available to anyone building health systems — free of the MUMPS runtime, the IRIS license, and the 1990s UX.
Disclaimer: OpenRPMS is an unofficial, independent project. It is not affiliated with the Indian Health Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the U.S. government. See Licensing for source and IP status of RPMS components.