OpenMRS

See the following -

OpenMRS Receives Free Software Award For Projects Of Social Benefit

Press Release | OpenMRS | March 23, 2013

OpenMRS, an Indianapolis-based free software platform for Health IT in the developing world, has received the 2012 Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Read More »

12 Students Picked to Work on OpenMRS Projects as Part of the Google Summer of Code 2018 Program

Congratulations and a warm welcome to the 12 students selected for Google Summer of Code 2018, and extended thanks to our fantastic group of OpenMRS project mentor volunteers, as well as all students that submitted applications this year! A total of 1,264 students from 64 different countries have been accepted to work with more than 200 open source projects for GSoC 2018. Since 2007, OpenMRS has enjoyed participating in this great program, and we’re thrilled to be involved again this year, marking our 12th year of participation. We’re looking forward to working with a diverse set of students and mentors across a range of exciting and impactful projects.

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5 Open Source Projects That Are Improving the World

One of the strengths of the open source community has been its ability to bring concentrated effort to bear on big problems. When tragedy strikes, or a pressing need arises, there are groups of people who gather together to attempt to solve the problems as a community. You may not have heard of these five open source projects, but they are attacking some of the world's biggest problems and making a true impact in people's lives... Read More »

6 Ways Programmers from Underrepresented Countries Can Get Ahead

Becoming a programmer from an underrepresented community like Cameroon is tough. Many Africans don't even know what computer programming is-and a lot who do think it's only for people from Western or Asian countries. I didn't own a computer until I was 18, and I didn't start programming until I was a 19-year-old high school senior, and had to write a lot of code on paper because I couldn't be carrying my big desktop to school. I have learned a lot over the past five years as I've moved up the ladder to become a successful programmer from an underrepresented community. While these lessons are from my experience in Africa, many apply to other underrepresented communities, including women.

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A Doctor Leverages Open Source to Learn How to Code And Improve Medical Care in Africa

Judy Gichoya is a medical doctor from Kenya who became a software developer after joining the open source medical records project, OpenMRS. The open source project creates medical informatics software that helps health professionals collect and present data to improve patient care in developing countries. After seeing how effective the open medical records system was at increasing efficiency and lowering costs for clinics in impoverished areas of Africa, she began hacking on the software herself to help improve it. Then she set up her own implementation in the slums outside Nairobi, and has done the same for dozens of clinics since. This is a classic story of open source contributors, who join in order to scratch an itch. But Gichoya was a doctor, not a programmer. How did she make the leap?

A Mature API for an Electronic Health Record: the OpenMRS Process

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | August 14, 2015

By some measures, OpenMRS may be the most successful of the open source EHRs, widely deployed around the world. It also has a long experience with its API, which has been developed and refined over the last several years. I talked to OpenMRS developer Wyclif Luyima recently and looked at OpenMRS’s REST API documentation to see what the API offers...

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A Primer on the Open Source Movement from a Health Care Perspective

Open source, in myriad forms, has emerged as a significant development model that drives both innovation and technological dispersion. Ignore it at your peril, as did the major computer companies destroyed or totally remade by Linux and free software, or encyclopedia publishers by Wikipedia, or journalists and marketers by social media. The term "open source" was associated first with free software, but it goes far beyond software now. People around the world use open hardware, demand open government, share open data, and--yes--pursue open health. The field of health, in particular, will be transformed by open source principles in software, in research, in consultations and telemedicine, and in the various forms of data sharing all these processes call for.

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AHRQ Providing Support for OpenMRS

Bernie Monegain | Government Health IT | March 15, 2013

As the AHRQ report explains it, “PIH and the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis conceived of OpenMRS in 2005 as a flexible, open source EMR that would be capable of meeting the demand for high-quality health information in developing countries such as Rwanda and Kenya, where the two organizations were then working. Read More »

Alabama and Other Southern States Embracing 'Open Health' Solutions

The installation and use of 'open source' electronic health record (EHR) systems have continued to spread across Alabama and many other states across the U.S.  See the map of healthcare facilities running some variant of the open source VistA electronic health record (EHR) system in Alabama and neighboring sta Read More »

AMPATH Improving Care At Scale With ODK and OpenMRS

Yaw Anokwa | Open Data Kit | January 24, 2012

AMPATH is the one of the largest HIV treatment programs in sub-Saharan Africa and is Kenya's most comprehensive initiative to combat the virus. The program's catchment area has over 2 million people and provides care to more than 130,000 HIV-positive patients across 55 urban and rural clinics. To provide care at this scale, AMPATH has invested in tools like OpenMRS (an open source medical record system) and Open Data Kit, to help improve the efficiency and impact of their health providers.

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An Interview with Open Source Health IT Project: LibreHealth

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPAA | December 7, 2016

LibreHealth is the largest health IT project to emerge recently, particularly in the area of free and open source software. In this video, Dr. Judy Gichoya of the LibreHealth project explains what clinicians in Africa are dealing with and what their IT needs are. Both developed and developing countries need better health IT systems to improve patient care. In the developed countries, electronic records and other health IT systems sprout complexities that reflect the health care systems in which they function...

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Apervita Creates Health Analytics for the Millions

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | January 9, 2015

I have often advocated for better integration of analytics into everyday medical practice, and I found a company called Apervita (originally named Pervasive Health) that jumps off in the right direction.

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Application Deadline to Host OpenMRS 2018 Annual Implementers Meet Coming Up

The deadline to apply to host the 2018 International OpenMRS Implementers conference is coming up on April 30 [updated]. Nations that want to host the meeting need to answer the detailed questionnaire by that time. For those Open Health News readers who have missed one of the greatest health IT stories of the decade, the Government of Uganda hosted the 2016 OpenMRS meeting in their capital city of Kampala. The conference was such an extraordinary success that a large number of other national governments volunteered to host the 2017 Implementer's conference. There are currently close to 40 countries around the world where OpenMRS is being implemented throughout the county in large-scale deployments.

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April 2013 Contributor Of The Month: Suranga Kasthurirathne

Michael Downey | OpenMRS | April 1, 2013

Each month, we highlight one of our community contributors so you have the chance to learn to learn more about the people involved in OpenMRS. This month, our community manager Michael Downey “sat down” virtually with Suranga Kasthurirathne from Sri Lanka to learn more about his story. Read More »

August 2013 Contributor Of The Month: Lee Breisacher

Michael Downey | OpenMRS | August 16, 2013

One of the ways the OpenMRS community highlights the work of its many volunteers is with a monthly profile of a contributor. It’s our hope that these interviews help you to learn more about others who help build our software and our community. A couple weeks ago, Michael Downey, OpenMRS community manager had a chat with Lee Breisacher [...]. Read More »