OpenMRS 2016 Implementers' Conference

The OpenMRS Implementers meetings began in 2006 as a way to bring members of the community together during a dedicated amount of time to collaborate, share implementation experiences, and find ways to improve OpenMRS. This year’s 2016 event is a blend of topics that include sessions covering traditional OpenMRS implementer as well as overarching OpenMRS topics. These sessions coincide with the planned as well as the unconference sessions. The meeting will provide an opportunity for health care team members, informaticians, developers, implementers, and end users to collaborate and innovate. As a result, developers improve their technical skills in OpenMRS, implementers share best practices from implementations, users and health care team members propose and prioritize their top features for future releases of the software to ensure that their needs are met.

The theme of this year’s meeting is: “eHealth for Better Patient Outcomes: Innovating and Strengthening Systems” #OMRS2016

• eHealth: The cost effective and secure use of ICT in support of health and health related fields, including healthcare services, health surveillance, health literature, and health education, knowledge and research.
• Patient Outcomes: The arc of history is increasingly clear: healthcare is shifting focus from the volume of services delivered to the value created for patients, with “value” defined as the outcomes achieved relative to the costs.
• Innovating: Updating and transforming
• Strengthening Systems: Interoperability, standards and integration of data through OpenHIE to improve data sharing, reporting and use.

Background

The Ministry of Health (MOH) in Uganda is in the process of publishing National Standards and Guidelines for Patient-Level Systems, which will be supported by an HIS Certification Process evaluating the compliance of implemented electronic patient-level systems and the delivery of the data being produced. The MOH is also in the process of implementing a national Health Management Information System (HMIS), based on DHIS2, for national monitoring and evaluation of health programs in Uganda.

In order to be in compliance with the new guidelines, the over 30 USG funded HIV Care & Treatment Implementing Partners within Uganda began collaborating on a national implementation of OpenMRS in 2006. The aim is to create a system to meet both the certification requirements and the operational and reporting needs of all partners, as well as to be sustainable for Ministry of Health support. The system will also be integrated into the national M&E system, based on DHIS2, to improve data quality, reporting and use.

To meet this aim, Makerere University School of Public Health, METS Program has developed a local community to collaborate and build capacity in design, development, implementation, and support. With the maturing of the global community and with the local community focused on the quality of their system and data to meet certification, the Uganda 2016 Implementer’s Meeting is a good opportunity to focus on quality of the processes pertaining to the building of the systems, quality of the outputs from the system, and quality in the delivery of those outputs.

A second aim of the conference is to focus on integration of systems, such as OpenMRS and DHIS2, to promote data reporting and use.

Participants also receive an opportunity to visit sites where OpenMRS is being used along with time to discuss the experiences and suggestions from those site visits afterward.

Objectives

• To demonstrate how Uganda is using a multi-partner and multi-funded approach to develop, implement, and support a national implementation of OpenMRS.
• To expand the OpenMRS community practices to support quality assurance processes (i.e. release testing, stakeholder acceptance testing, module gardening team, etc.)
• To identify the ways to measure a “successful high quality implementation” of OpenMRS and why it is important to go beyond just software development features and bug fixes.
• To understand ways in which OpenMRS outputs can be used to positively impact the quality of clinical care and the quality of programs that support care.

Who should attend

• People new to OpenMRS who want to connect to others using the platform around the world
• Experienced OpenMRS implementers who want to share their experiences and learn from others
• OpenMRS platform developers – anyone building systems to integrate with or extend OpenMRS
• Developers of related health and healthcare application software
• Health practitioners, researchers and publishers
• You!