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…
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

The first official release OpenMRS 1.4 is now available for download at http://openmrs.org/wiki/Downloads. This is our new stable release, replacing 1.3.4.

Important note: Upgrading to 1.4 will update your database in a way that cannot be undone, so you cannot go back to 1.3 after upgrading. Please be sure to backup your database before doing the upgrade so you have a way out.

Thanks to everyone who contributed code to this release, as well as to everyone who found and reported bugs. The following are lists of the new features and bugfixes that have happened since 1.3.0, along with their ticket numbers. (This is approximate–I may have missed some, and several of these have been backported to 1.3.x maintenance releases.)
Read the rest of this entry »

OpenMRS is once again proud to announce our participation in the 2009 Google Summer of Code! This will be our third year of participation in the program and the collective mentorship wisdom our community has accumulated over the past couple of years should help make this our best year yet! Last year’s students set a high standard. Several of the projects from last summer have made substantive contributions to OpenMRS and, more importantly, several of last year’s students are still actively involved in OpenMRS development! Additionally, we’re very excited to get feedback that this experience is enticing students to consider careers in medical informatics with a global focus.

For more information about the program, see http://code.google.com/soc/.

We now have the long-awaited release candidate for OpenMRS 1.4. You can find this on the pre-releases section of the downloads page.

What does “Release Candidate” mean? This is not yet a final release: we recommend that most people continue running their production systems off the latest stable release, which is 1.3.4. But at this point 1.4 has been through quite a bit of testing, and we’re pretty confident that it’s good to go. We’d love to see even more of you download and test it: assuming all goes well we will be doing the final release in the next 2 weeks.

The biggest improvement is a bit below the radar and won’t be immediately visible: there has been a data model change that allows us to represent concept names in a much richer way. You can read more about that here.

There are numerous bug fixes in all parts of the system as well. As a random example, we now support names with more than three components (Hola Latinoamerica!).

Thanks to everyone who did alpha and beta testing. We wouldn’t be confident that things were fairly bug-free if you all weren’t out there doing testing, and finding bugs. If you reported a bug in 1.4, then I owe you a beer or a fanta citron next time I’m in your area.

-Darius

PS- For those who are curious, the bugs fixed since 1.4 Beta 2 are listed here.
The bugs fixed since the very first 1.4 pre-release are listed here.

OpenMRS 1.3.4 has been released. This is a bug fix release over the current 1.3.3 release. See the release notes for details.

1.3.4 can be downloaded from http://download.openmrs.org.

OpenMRS 1.3.3 has been released. This is a bug fix release over the current 1.3.2 release.

See the release notes for more information.

1.3.3 can be downloaded from http://download.openmrs.org.

We’re now entering the third week of the E-Health: Software Development and Implementation course (or EHSDI) in Rwanda. (Which means this blog post is about two weeks too late, but who’s counting?)

The government of Rwanda has chosen to use OpenMRS as a national medical record system, used at all health facilities, as part of the country’s Vision 2020. This sort of nationwide rollout will require local technicians, data managers, and programmers to implement, manage, and further develop software modules to address Rwanda’s clinical needs.

To help achieve this goal, the International Development Research Centre is funding an innovative technical mentorship program to train Rwandan programmers to be local software developers for OpenMRS. EHSDI is run primarily by Partners In Health and the Rwandan Information Technology Authority. Ten students were selected from the recent graduates of top Rwandan universities after a rigorous written exam and interview. The three mentors are experienced computer programmers, and the program will also include presentations by guest lecturers from Rwanda, and other countries.

The first portion of the curriculum covers web, Java, and enterprise technologies used in OpenMRS, as well as medical informatics topics. During the second stage, students will use their new knowledge to develop OpenMRS modules that have been requested by future users in Rwanda.

We plan to duplicate this program in other countries, using training materials developed during EHSDI, and hopefully under the leadership and expertise of the new Rwandan students.

Questions about the program? Amy Tang (atang@pih.org) is the project manager.

Want to give a guest lecture on Java, OpenMRS, or medical informatics? In person or over a video link? Let Amy know about that too.

Also, we have one open mentor position, and others will open down the road, so if you’re interested, then check out the job posting