Hi All,

Thanks to everyone who tested our alpha release of 1.6, we’re releasing 1.6 Beta. You can get it on the downloads page.

We’ve made only two significant changes since the alpha:

• We’ve implemented “core modules” properly, meaning that we may now have modules that are required by core, and OpenMRS will not start up if they are not present. (The purpose is to make it easier for feature development to happen independently. Logic is the only one of these at the moment.)
• We had switched the role name from “System Developer” to “Administrator” but we’ve switched that back. It will change to Administrator again in the future, but not until we have added an integer primary key to the table so that we may correctly rename the role, instead of deleting and re-adding it. (Thanks Mark Goodrich for testing with the Patient Flags module and catching this.)

You can see the additional trivial changes in the release notes.

We still need to see some further testing of Beta release before we’re ready to move onto a release candidate. And I’m actually going on vacation for a week. So…go ahead and test away so that when I get back we’ll be all set to release.

-Darius

Hi OpenMRS Community,

Our first alpha preview release of OpenMRS 1.6 is ready!

First off, I’d like to thank the 35 developers who contributed code to this release: Agnor, arthurs, ayeung, ball, bmckown, bwolfe, cliff.mcintosh, dfuterman, djazayeri, dthomas, emendez, ewolodzko, hkwathome, jamesm, jmiranda, Keelhaul, Knoll_Frank, luzhuangwei, madanmohan, mkopinsky, mogoodrich, mseaton, msheley, n.nehete, nribeka, Pascal, r0bby, rarcos, rcrichton, samrajni, sunbiz, suneeth, tmdugan, upul, yatitandon

You can read the release notes here or, if you’re impatient, you can go straight to the prerelease downloads page.

Note that this is a PRE-release, intended for testing, and not for production deployment. The changes made in 1.6 are much less invasive than those we made in 1.5, so I expect there to be far fewer bugs, and I expect us to be able to get to beta, or even to a release candidate, within a couple weeks. But to do that we need your help. We need people to install 1.6 alpha, play around with it and look for bugs.

There are three specific things I’d really like to ask for help testing:

• Everyone, even if you don’t have time for thorough testing, should try making a copy of their database, upgrading it by running this 1.6 alpha war, and reporting any failures
• People who use logic should test their code and make sure it still works now that most logic code has been pulled out into a module
• If you want to have Patients-who-are-Users then that is now possible. Please test it!
• Module owners should re-test their modules, because of a small number of unavoidable non-backwards-compatible changes. HTML Form Entry is broken, for instance.

A week from today I would like to release an alpha-2 or a beta release, so do your testing sooner rather than later.

Thanks,
Darius

OpenMRS is planning a Meet-and-Greet at AMIA 2009 in San Francisco on Tuesday, 17-November, at 7:30 pm.  We will meet for drinks at the Urban Tavern next to the Hilton.

1.5 is packed with new features!

• Simplified upgrades
• Simplified initial startup and deployment
• Ability to store large “complex” observations
• Better support for UTF-8 characters
• Improved memory management
• Automatic UUIDs added for all objects/rows

A larger and more detailed list of features can be found on the release notes page.


To upgrade from 1.3/1.4 to 1.5, simply download the openmrs war file and put it into your tomcat instance. The openmrs webapp will restart and enter “maintenance mode” to lead you through upgrading your database.


A huge thanks to the many people that contributed code or bug reports to
this release!


Download OpenMRS 1.5.0
Release notes for 1.5.0

We’re very excited to announce the 1st Annual Latin American Open Source Health Informatics Meeting (IMeCA 2009) in Lima, Peru the 26-31 of October 2009.
The principal objectives of the 1st IMeCA 2009 are:

1. Show the benefits of open source electronic medical record software and community development to empower local organizations
2. Understand the issues and needs of health care organizations in Latin America in using such systems
3. Strengthen networks, promote coordination of efforts between different Latin American organizations, and connect them to the already existing community in Africa
4. Train programmers and data managers how to create systems in OpenMRS so that they can become part of the development community

IMeCA 2009 will bring together participants from around the region: decison makers in primary health care settings, policy makers, open source software developers, public health researchers, NGO and private sector representatives, health and science experts from the public sector and academic institutions. The goal is to come together to share lessons learned and build a dialogue around eHealth priorities (and new directions) for the LAC region.

Joaquin Blaya writes:

We just finished a 3 day (July 8-10, 2009) workshop on OpenMRS in Guatemala for Ministry of Health and CDC personnel from different Central American countries…

Read the post

On May 26th we had an OpenMRS developers and implementers meeting in Boston at Harvard Medical School. The goal was to introduce people in the US east coast to OpenMRS, and to give developers, users and potential users a chance to meet and learn about the system. We also provided phone and Skype connections for international groups, and had 13 people from Kigali, Rwanda on the OpenMRS training course participating, along with others from Peru, Nicaragua and the US. The slides were put on Slideshare before each lecture.

We also had breakouts in the afternoon on topics chosen partly by the audience. We will add those results to the Wiki. This meeting was at short notice to take advantage of having key team members like Chris Seebregts in Boston. In future we will try to plan meetings more in advance and widen the audience as well as improve on our live presence.

On June 24-25, 2009, Hospital Albert Schweitzer, in Deschapelles Haiti, is planning to host a mini OpenMRS Implementers Conference. They are doing this specifically for Visitation Hospital in Petite Riviere de Nippes, to help them get setup to run OpenMRS. They wanted to invite anyone else (primarily those in Haiti) who are interested to participate, either by presenting a topic or by just attending so they can see how it’s done. Food and lodging expenses are $55 US. Our proposed agenda is as follows…
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Darius Jazayeri has won the 2009 Pizzigati Prize for Public Interest Computing from the Tides Foundation, partly for his work on OpenMRS. Darius has worked on open source medical records in developing countries with Partners in Health for eight years where he is the lead software designer, and has been one of the lead designers of OpenMRS since 2005. It is great to see one of the OpenMRS team recognized, and the funding will help with OpenMRS meetings and development work.

OpenMRS is proud to announce our summer internships for 2009.  We are once again participating in Google Summer of Code.  We are also mentoring projects this summer as part of our IDRC-funded OpenMRS Internship Program (OIP), which focuses on mentoring and capacity building in developing countries.
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