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

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.

• 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

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.

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

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.

• Wednesday, June 24, 2009
  • 9:00AM to 12:00PM — Overview of HAS Implementation — See new patients added, encounters created, data entry (InfoPath forms completed), etc.
  • Lunch Break
  • 1:00PM to 3:00PM — Overview of Server architecture — Java, MySQL, Tomcat, properties and language files, deploying OpenMRS war files (upgrades), building a module or war file from source (if desired), installing modules, backup, etc.
• Thursday, June 25, 2009
  • 8:00AM to 10:00AM — Overview of Concept Dictionary and concept creation
  • 10:00AM to 12:00PM — InfoPath Form Design, how to design a simple form
  • Lunch Break
  • 1:00PM to 4:00PM — Overview of Reporting, including Cohort Builder, Cohort Reports, Jasper Reports, etc.

Please contact James Arbaugh, jarbaugh-at-hashaiti.org for more information, or if you would like to attend.

Jaoa Portela from Portugal will be building a WYSIWYG form designer for the HTML form entry module.  As many in the OpenMRS community know, we can use all the alternatives for data collection we can find.  Darius made a great module for crafting HTML-based forms as an alternative to InfoPath and Jaoa will make form building even easier.  Primary mentor: Darius Jazayeri, Backup mentor: Daniel Futerman.

Dilupa Munindradasa from Sri Lanka will be integrating a Quartz scheduler into OpenMRS.  Justin created our current scheduler that’s responsible for running and managing all of the background processes for OpenMRS.  Quartz is an open-source enterprise-level job scheduler that can further enhance our background job processing capabilities.  We’ve wanted to adopt Quartz for a while, but just haven’t had the time.  Dilupa will be able to bring enterprise level job scheduling to all of our OpenMRS implementations.  Primary mentor: Justin Miranda, Backup mentor: Vibha Anand.

Lu Zhuang Wei from China will be building a serialization service for OpenMRS.  Web services and some of our core reporting tools depend on the ability to efficiently transform OpenMRS “objects” into other formats.  To date, we have been using various and sometimes redundant methods to do this work throughout OpenMRS.  By introducing a new core service into OpenMRS, Lu will help us consolidate and improve our core code.  Primary mentor: Ben Wolfe, Backup mentor: Daniel Kayiwa.

Omar Verduga from Mexico will be building a longitudinal data review (flowsheet) module for OpenMRS.  Providers, data managers, and researchers often depend on quick and intuitive access to historic patient data.  Omar will help us build the first version of a cutting-edge clinical data viewing tool for OpenMRS. Primary mentor: Paul Biondich, Backup mentor: Maros Cunderlik.

Pavel Konnikov from Russia will be adding global Property types to OpenMRS.  Many different parts of OpenMRS, from modules to portlets to general features depend on global property settings to fine-tune them to fit an implementation’s needs.  Currently, managing various settings is fairly clumsy within OpenMRS.  Pavel will pave the way for much more sophisticated handling of global property settings within OpenMRS.  Primary mentor: Dave Thomas, Backup mentor: Justin Miranda.

Antoine Nzeyimana from Rwanda will be enhancing data synchronization by improving the process needed to create a new node.  Partners In Health has been field-testing data synchronization, which allows multiple OpenMRS servers to share data.  As the OpenMRS team works to make this a core feature available to all implementations, one of the challenges is improving the addition of a new server to the network.  Antoine, who helped with synchronization last year, will be joining us again to improve this critical piece of the synchronization puzzle.  Primary mentor: Maros Cunderlik, Backup mentor: Ben Wolfe.

Harshini Gudiwada from India will be adding role-based home page support to OpenMRS.  Several implementations have asked for the ability to have different people see a different starting screen when logging into OpenMRS.  Harshini will make this possible under the mentorship of Saptarshi, one of last year’s Google Summer of Code students.  Primary mentor: Saptashi Purkayastha, Backup mentor: Darius Jazayeri.

Nimantha Baranasuriya from Sri Lanka will be building an audit module for OpenMRS.  Any one managing large amounts of clinical data knows that quality data requires not only safeguards to ensure data errors are avoided wherever possible, but also tools to monitor the data for inconsistencies or errors.  Nimantha will be creating a tool that can be used by any OpenMRS implementation to facilitate data quality monitoring.  Primary mentor: Brian McKown, Backup mentor: Mike Seaton.

Katherin Kuan from the U.S. will be building video upload capabality for Moca mobile devices load ultrasound and other video media into OpenMRS.  Moca has built mobile tools that integrate with OpenMRS.  Katherine will help add clinical video uploading to the list of mobile possibilities.  Primary mentor: Gari Clifford, Backup mentors: Zack Anderson and RJ Ryan.

Jenny Liu from the U.S. will be building authentication and registration capabilities for Moca mobile devices integrated with OpenMRS.  Several mobile solutions are being built around OpenMRS and they all need a way to authenticate and register patients.  While working on a solution for Moca mobile devices, Jenny will help create a standard model for mobile authorization/registration in OpenMRS for other mobile solutions to use as well.  Primary mentor: Zack Anderson, Backup mentors: Gari Clifford and RJ Ryan.

Upul Godage from Sri Lanka will be adding active lists support to OpenMRS.  Some of the key data elements for any electronic medical record system are problem lists and allergy lists.  Upul will help make these a core part of OpenMRS.  Primary mentor: Burke Mamlin, Backup mentor: Dave Thomas.

Robert O’Connor from the U.S. will be creating aggregate data entry tools for OpenMRS.  While OpenMRS strives to build reports from high quality patient-level data, sometimes reports depend on aggregate data from external systems.  Robert will allow implementations to enter and manage these data within OpenMRS so they can be used by reporting tools.   Primary mentor: Mike Seaton, backup mentor: Darius Jazayeri.

Amogha Gundavaram from India will be integrating the OpenEMPI Master Patient Index with OpenMRS.  OpenEMPI is an open-source master patient index system.  As organizations grow, they often need to move control of the master patient list from the electronic medical record system to a centralized system, such as OpenEMPI.  Amogha will help create a module or messaging solution to integrate OpenMRS with OpenEMPI.   Primary mentor: Odysseas Pentakalos, Backup mentor: Shaun Grannis.

Saketh Bhamidipati from the U.S. will be enhancing the patient de-duplication workflow in the OpenMRS patient matching module.  As implementations grow, ending up with duplicate patient records is a common problem.  Shaun is a leader in the field of patient matching and mentored a student last year in creating a patient matching module for OpenMRS.  This summer, Saketh will improve the interface so that patient de-duplication will become a tool in every OpenMRS implementation’s arsenal.   Primary mentor: Shaun Grannis, Backup mentor: James Egg.

Moses Mugisha from Uganda will be integrating FrontlineSMS with OpenMRS.  FrontlineSMS is an innovative solution for gathering data via SMS messages, even allowing simple forms to be sent to devices and responses collected over SMS.  Moses will integrate FrontlineSMS with OpenMRS, allowing simple form data using OpenMRS concepts to be collected from mobile phones over SMS.  Primary mentor: Daniel Kayiwa, Backup mentor: Paul Biondich.

Felicia Rosemond from the U.S. will be adding global caching support to the OpenMRS decision support engine.  We have created a logic engine to support complex decision support rules at a low level within OpenMRS.  One of the critical improvements needed for this service to become widely used is improved caching of derived results.  Felicia will replace the existing rudimentary caching in the logic service with a high quality open-source caching library.  Primary mentor: Tammy Dugan, Backup mentor: Burke Mamlin.

OpenMRS is also excited to announce that, thanks to the generosity of the team at Verio.com, each of our summer interns will have access to their own public hosted server running OpenMRS within which they can load, debug, and demonstrate real-time project progress to the rest of the community.  This will not only provide a great resource for the interns, but will facilitate getting valuable feedback from end users.  Thank you Verio!

We’re honored by the excellent interns listed above as well as the many others who applied and we couldn’t accommodate this summer.  We’re also thankful for a great (and growing) group of OpenMRS mentors and we’re looking forward to the best summer of coding yet!

- The OpenMRS Team