Monday, December 17, 2012

KenyaEMR Release 2012.2.1

As anticipated, we have released KenyaEMR 2012.2.1. This is a minor update to the 2012.2 release and includes the following:
  • ARV Drug Regimen remodeling and improved UI 
  • Combined registration home and scheduling page into single dashboard 
  • Added CD4% to medical summary chart 
  • Improved user interface design elements (graphics and layout) for easier user interaction 
  • Improved software administration interface to monitor system 
  • Multiple bug fixes 
  • Updates to current version of OpenMRS modules 
These features are outlined in more detail, along with the priorities and dates for the next release, in the Roadmap at http://tiny.cc/KenyaEMRreleases

You can view a working demo of the release at: https://demo.kenyaemr.org/openmrs/login.htm

Login is demo/demo.

Rowan has created a zipped version of the modules to update any existing servers, otherwise you will build a fresh virtual machine appliance for new installations. Please let us know if you have any issues with accessing the code.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

KenyaEMR Release 2012.2 - Minimum Implementable Release (Woohoo!)

I’m excited to let you know that the team released KenyaEMR 2012.2. We are considering this the MIR - minimum implementable release.  This will be the first release that is going to be implemented into any of the facilities in Kenya - starting this week!  Main features included are as follows:

  • Patient Registration 
  • HIV C&T - MOH 257 
  • TB Program C&T – TB Card 
  • Obstetric History 
  • Family History 
  • Lab Results 
  • Patient Summary with Trending 
  • Limited Patient Scheduling and Calendar 
  • Phase I Decision Support including Clinical Alerts 
  • Phase I Retrospective Data Entry 
  • National and Facility Level Reporting 
  • Role Based Access and Workflows 
  • User and System Administration Functions 
  • Standard Build System, Virtual Appliance (Virtual Machine) 
  • Versioning System in Banner 

These features are outlined in more detail in the Roadmap at http://tiny.cc/KenyaEMRreleases

You can view a working demo of the release at: https://demo.kenyaemr.org/openmrs/login.htm
Login is demo/demo.

Please let us know if you have any issues with accessing the code.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Once in a blue moon

Not much updating in July, but lots of progress.

Presented our KenyaEMR work to MOH early in the month (very well received)

Working on a few things:
1) expanding development resources
2) moving from the current rapid process to the development processes we already use for OpenELIS and iSante (more on that as those changes take effect)
3) paying a bit more attention to our communication through the site, this blog, etc.

See the demo system (June 26 posting link still valid) to set a sense of changes and progress.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Updated demo

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I'm working on too many things simultaneously...

I updated the demo server this morning with the latest code, which includes a lot of UX fixes Bill and I discussed. We don't have the latest forms that Vincent has built in yet. I'll get to that as soon as I can.

Also, the demo server now has a new IP address:
https://69.91.227.20/openmrs
user: demo
pass: demo

Monday, June 18, 2012

Do we want a location hierarchy?

OpenMRS supports the idea of a location hierarchy. Is this something we want to use?

Imagine we do an installation at Amani Hospital. Is there any point in recording that certain encounters take place at different sub-locations? E.g. "Amani Hospital - Outpatient Clinic", "Amani Hospital - Outpatient Pharmacy", etc.

I'm assuming this is not helpful, but someone should let me know if they think it will be. :-)

The only reason I ask at all is because I've always sort-of wanted to use the feature, but never had a chance...

Default encounter dates and locations

A note to everyone who's working on HTML forms: make sure they all have the right default date and location set when being filled out, by doing something like this:
<encounterDate default="now" showTime="true"/><encounterLocation default="GlobalProperty:kenyaemr.defaultLocation"/>
It's important that we include times in our encounters, to support our point-of-care use case, and because if we don't set encounter times, they won't be assigned to visits correctly. (I just described this to Rajib in India on the OpenMRS developers list here.)


Getting the default location from a global property won't actually work until version 1.9.5 of HTML Form Entry is released, since I just made the fix today. (There are a bunch of open tickets in HFE 1.9.5, but I think we're going to need to push the versions back and release something including this specific fix before we deploy anywhere.)

Official Metadata Server

As of recently we have a VM set up to be our "Official Metadata" server. It lives at https://69.91.227.32/openmrs(At some point this should move to Kenya, and get a real hostname.)

We will create the final "official" versions of all our metadata there. I.e. things like Visit Types, and Forms. The key point is that we'll generate all of our metadata sharing packages from this server, and only this server.

That means you shouldn't do anything on this server unless the item you create or edit is ready to deploy to production. If you need a login (Steven, George, Patrick, Jan) I believe that Jim or I can create one for you.

I've just created the first piece of info. Does it look right?

Sunday, June 17, 2012

First-time Setup

We were talking about the facility registry again on Friday, and although we haven't yet decided exactly what subset we're going to load up into the system, we do know that we're building this EMR to run at a single facility, so the first time you run the system after installation, you need to configure that location.

I just added some code so that if the system isn't configured yet, the homepage redirects you to the First-Time Setup page.

At the moment the only setting to configure is what location we're installed at, but in the future we'll probably also want to enable or disable certain apps from there. For example we might want to decide whether or not to enable the "Triage & Vitals" app at installation-time, depending on whether there's a computer at that station in the actual facility.

On the docket for tomorrow is creating htmlformentry module tickets about allowing us to use this selected location in a few places. Like these:
<encounterLocation default="gp:kenyaemr.defaultLocation"/>
<lookup expression="fn.globalProperty('kenyaemr.defaultLocation')"/>
Offhand I'm not actually sure there's any way to access this in an HTML Form, and we're going to need to.

Also tomorrow (known as "today" in Kenya) I'll look at the work Vincent and Steven have done on the MoH 257 encounter form, and see if we can incorporate that into the codebase.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Alerts and the Calculation module

At OpenMRS we're about to release the Calculation module, which is good, because I've never enjoyed working with the Logic module. Today I incorporated the Calculation module and the Reporting module into our Kenya EMR module to dynamically produce our first alert: if the patient hasn't had a CD4 result in the last 180 days, you see a "Needs CD4" flag. (This is just a placeholder, I'm counting on the team in Kenya to decide what alerts we should actually be showing.)

This alert is dynamic!
It ended up taking all day, and I ended up duplicating some work I should have just copied from Mike Seaton's work on the calculation branch of the reporting module. Though it'll be even better when we finish making the reporting module support Calculations.

In any case, adding more alerts should be pretty straightforward.

You can see the commit here.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Apps and Privileges

Since we're about to show our demo to a wider audience, I figured it was about time for the App Framework module to let you limit apps to only certain users. I had originally planned for a table that would allow you to enable apps per-user or per-role, but after the OpenMRS design discussions around our recent Roles and Privileges sprint I decided it's a better idea to just let each app have a privilege, and use the standard Role mechanism to do access control.

Anyway, the ticket for this fix is here, and the code is here. This is now available in version 1.2 of the App Framework module.

Then I created a new version of our core metadata package including Clinician, Registration Clerk, and All Apps roles, only to find that there's a bug with Metadata Sharing and OpenMRS 1.9 when I try to import these into the demo server. I'll create a ticket for that tomorrow.

In the meantime I manually set up a role for the demo user on the demo server so they're no longer a superuser. We won't be showing the role-based apps yet, but at least not everyone will be able to upload modules to our demo server. :-)

Join us on the OpenMRS Developers Forum

Tomorrow (Thursday) we will be describing the project and some of our work to date at the OpenMRS Developers Forum. Join us!

We should be covering:

  • About the project (Bill)
  • Technical background and OpenMRS modules (Darius)
  • MoH 257, the MVP/CIEL dictionary, etc (Steven)

If I knew how to attach a file on blogger, I'd upload my presentation slides...

[ Edit: uploaded to slideshare. ]

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Uploading a new Software Version

Since I was working in the Admin section, and I mentioned uploading new versions of the module, I figured I should go implement that functionality.

Our end goal for this is for the system to automatically ping the official release server, download new versions when they're available, and prompt the local sysadmin to do a one-click install once they're in a position where a little downtime is acceptable. Unfortunately we need to do more work on the moduledistro module before we can get there.

For now, here's a quick implementation that lets you do a file upload.

Conveniently I got to fix a little bug along the way about not being able to put a @RequestParam annotation on a method parameter other than the file one.

User Management Screenshots

I still have a horrible cold, so if you don't like what I've done here, blame that! :-)

One of the strategies we are taking with this OpenMRS distribution to keep things maintainable as we scale up is that we will not let you access much of the rich configurability that OpenMRS has under the hood. The software updates we push out over time will contain "opinionated" configuration settings, and the user interface will only let a local system administrator modify the things they really need to locally modify.

So they'll see something like this: (we may add a few more actions, but not many)

I've now finished a first-pass at the user management pages, which also guide you through a limited set of functionality. (For example, you're not allowed to create a user account for an existing patient. A user is only allowed to have a single real name. Things like that.)

the Manage Users page

Creating a new user

Viewing an existing user

You can only edit subsets of a user's details per screen


Monday, June 11, 2012

Back to Work

Hi all, sorry for the radio silence. I was in Chicago all last week doing some planning for a related project. More on this at some future point, I hope.

Anyway, as of today I'm back to coding, though I also have a bad cold which is really killing my productivity. I blame the airplane.

I worked on letting the sysadmin create users, which also involved refactoring the "patientList" fragment into a more generic widget than can be used both for Patients and Users. The create user UI will be simpler and more limited than what OpenMRS provides. In particular I'm limiting the "New User" function to always create a new Person, i.e. it won't let you attach a user account to an existing Patient. Any thoughts on this? Hopefully I'll have this up and running midway through tomorrow.

On Thursday's OpenMRS developer call we'll be talking about the project, and showing our work-in-progress to the broader OpenMRS community. Before then I need to catch up with the Intellisoft devs about how mapping the MoH 257 forms to the MVP dictionary is working, and also see how we've decided to break down the paper form into multiple electronic forms for real-time electronic capture.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Assembling a zip file via Maven

Up until this point I've been manually assembling the distro zip file. It's not really that complicated (just putting the relevant version of OpenMRS module into a zip file) but it would really be better if it were automated, and anyone could do it without having any special knowledge.

I spent some time this weekend getting this scripted. I decided to do it using maven, because it seemed like the "right" thing to do, though, or maybe because I wanted to punish myself...

I added a "distro" maven module to the kenyaemr project.

First off, since the omod files for the modules we depend on are not checked into the maven repository, I used the antrun plugin to get them. (Unfortunately we need a custom build of the metadata sharing module until Rafal releases 1.0.8, so that is commented out.)

Then I use the resources plugin to copy the compiled kenyamr.omod from ../omod/target into a folder with all the downloaded omods, and I use the assembly plugin with a custom descriptor to zip up that folder.

I also wrapped the whole thing up in a profile that is activated when you set buildDistro=true. So the whole build is run as:
mvn -DbuildDistro=true package
I'd welcome any comments on ways to improve what I did. (See the code I checked in.) I'm sure there's a much more "elegant" way to do this with maven. (At the very least I don't need the resources plugin, because I can just have the assembly plugin get that file from ../omod/target.)

Demo is updated

A few days back I posted about having split things up into separate apps for the two different clinician workflows.

This is now up on the demo server:
url: https://69.91.227.134/openmrs
username: demo
password: demo

Friday, June 1, 2012

Mapping MOH 257 to CIEL/MVP

I mentioned early on that we want to use the MVP/CIEL concept dictionary, because curating concept dictionary is a lot of work, and we should really be leveraging existing resources and expertise.

IntelliSOFT is just coming on board the project, and they're going to start by mapping the MOH 257 data elements to the MVP/CIEL dictionary. First off, you guys should say hi and introduce yourselves. :-)

It would be great to know if someone out there has already done the work of mapping MOH 257 to MVP/CIEL (or to another OpenMRS dictionary like AMPATH, or to SNOMED/ICD, ...) who could share that work with us. Anybody?

Anyway, I spoke with Andy Kanter today, and he suggested a process for how you should go about the mapping process. After typing it up in a private email, I figured it would be useful to post here, after the jump...

Clinicians have more than one workflow

Something that came up last week when Bill, Jan, and I went over the first demo UI was that clinicians probably need two different workflows for looking at patient charts.

First, there's the scenario where there's a patient standing in front of you in a consultation. You should definitely see existing high-value data items and alerts, but mostly you've got the chart open because you're going to be recording data about the current encounter.

Second is the scenario where you want to review the full history in the patient's chart. Most likely there's no patient physically in the room with you, and you want to see lots of information, but not necessarily record anything.

We'll definitely have to test the assumption that these are the relevant workflows, but for now I've tweaked the Kenya EMR module code to have two distinct apps. I'm calling the first "Medical Encounter" and the second "Medical Chart", though these are definitely subject to change.

Here are some screenshots. (I haven't uploaded this to the demo server yet.)

"Medical Encounter" limits your view to patients who have already been checked in by Registration.

"Medical Encounter" focuses on the current visit, and lets you see data collected so far in this visit.
(Still To-Do: some actual data entry forms for this workflow.)

"Medical Chart" lets you search among all patients (not just those checked in).

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Fixing an OpenMRS module-loading bug (and the awesomeness of the UI Framework)

First off, I should say that developing the Kenya EMR module using the UI Framework has been awesome. Being able to add and modify controllers and views without having to redeploy the module is just a massive productivity boost. Particularly when it comes to adding ajax functionality, which is really not one of my fortés, it's great to be able to quickly add a method that returns some json, write some javascript to call it, and quickly tweak the json output because I got it wrong at first. :-)

However, since the UI Framework module is still beta, I occasionally need to make some tweaks. And I've been running into a really annoying OpenMRS bug (TRUNK-3384) where whenever I update the UI Framework module, it tries to restart other modules in the wrong order, and I end up having to manually restart the App Framework and Kenya EMR modules.

So, I finally got fed up, and decided to fix it. And I hope the couple of hours I spent on it pays for itself in reduced annoyance. :-)

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Master Facility List

I don't love Wednesdays, because I have 4+ hours of scheduled calls. There's nothing wrong with any individual call, it's when you put them together...

Anyway, after 6 hours on the phone today, I figured I'd look into a smaller task, namely writing some code to upload the master Kenya Health Facilities List into OpenMRS so I could include it in our distro as a Metadata Sharing package.

So I opened the spreadsheet up for the first time and really looked at it. It's amazing to see that all this data is codified at all. But for some reason (lack of imagination I guess) I wasn't expecting to find 8110 facilities. So, pretty awesome. But I guess I'll need some guidance about what fraction of the facility list we actually include in the database...

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Reworked the Registration App

I spent most of today reworking the registration app based on Bill and Jan's feedback from Friday. Originally I had devoted too much code and screen real estate to showing a patient's complete visit history, which is really not relevant to the main workflow of the front desk clerk. So I've simplified things.

Also I added a header bar that we'll use whenever there's a patient selected.

I updated the demo server--comments are welcome.
url: https://69.91.227.134/openmrs
user: demo
password: demo
The main To-Dos that I already know about are that:

  1. the Create Patient page needs to be based on the MoH 257 form
  2. we need Edit buttons on the patient and visit boxes on the left side
Here's a screenshot:

Friday, May 25, 2012

Check out our first demo!

Want to see a demo of the work we've been doing? Well, now you can!
url: https://69.91.227.134/openmrs
username: demo
password: demo
This is a first pass at wiring everything together. Bill, Jan, Jim, and I had some discussions today, and we have a list of UI changes that I'll work on next week. One key realization is that we probably want to split what I'd previously been thinking of as one "Medical Chart" app into two: one for the clinician to document the current visit, and another for in-depth review of a patient's full history.

Another next step is to actually incorporate the MoH 257 data points, rather than the placeholder ones (weight, height, BP) I put in.

Also, sadly, setting up the demo server wasn't quite as easy as I hoped. For some reason the metadata sharing package that included the HTML Form didn't install when I uploaded the distro zip, and I had to manually create it. I'll need to look into that soon, so that others can install this demo locally just by using OpenMRS standalone plus this zip file. :-)

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Viewable progress! Development Site Now Hosted

As of yesterday, we now have a site hosted with a base installation of OpenMRS 1.9 RC4 and the MVP concept dictionary (pre-customization for the national Kenya implementation).  To be updated by Darius soon with the Kenya development.


Check it out at https://69.91.227.134/openmrs/

(Username and password coming shortly)

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Overriding the OpenMRS homepage

I've seen some pretty ugly attempts to override the page you see when you go to .../openmrs/index.htm. And I was in the middle of doing yet another of those ugly attempts when I remembered "Mike has done this recently...".

And good thing I asked. It turns out to be as trivial as just doing this:
/**
 * Takes over /index.htm so users don't see the legacy OpenMRS UI
 */
@Controller
public class HomepageOverrideController {
 
 @RequestMapping("/index.htm")
 public String showOurHomepage() {
  return "forward:/pages/kenyaHome.page";
 }
 
}
No need to do a homepage portlet that does a client-side redirect, or any of the other ugly things I've seen done.

Thanks, Mike, for saving me time, and preventing ugly code.

PS- If you're doing this you should also override the login page at /login.htm

Let's do some User Interface!

Just a quick note to say that after doing a lot of back-end framework-y work for the last couple of weeks, this week I'm going to be working on some front-end user-facing workflows.

Eric is working on setting up a VM suitable for OpenMRS hosting, so hopefully by the end of the week you'll be able to see a non-wireframe demo of this image.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Metadata Sharing with OpenMRS 1.9

I included some use of the Metadata Sharing module in my end-to-end demonstration last week, but it was partly cheating because I only included Encounter Types and Visit Types in the package, and didn't include Concepts, which haven't yet been shown to work with OpenMRS 1.9.

Hey, one thing at a time.

So I just made a MDS package out of the "Vitals" HTML Form that I used for the screenshots in my last blog post. This includes concepts in it for testing purposes. (Though in practice we'll be writing our forms against MVP/CIEL dictionary codes, so our forms won't actually need to include concepts when we push them to production. We'll be pushing out the updated MVP/CIEL dictionary to our production installations some other way.)

Trying to import that package I ran into two bugs (but only two!):

  1. META-226 - getDeproxiedClass does not work right in OpenMRS 1.9
  2. META-227 - Starting in OpenMRS 1.9 you are not allowed to modify ConceptDatatypes, so we need to stop exporting/importing them
After fixing the first bug, and putting in a quick-hack workaround for the second, I was able to successfully import the MDS package.

I'm glad it was that straightforward, and we're closer than I thought to being able to use MDS with OpenMRS 1.9 for our use case. (To be fair, the database I exported from didn't have any concept mappings on the exported concepts, and I'm pretty sure those would break with a third, more significant, bug. But also to be fair, as long as we can hand-wave and say that we'll be able to update the MVP/CIEL dictionary "some other way", we won't need to deal with this.)

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Screenshots!

A couple of days ago I joked that I was just posting text, and no pretty pictures. Today I plan to make up for that in spades. (Though I can't promise the pictures will be pretty.)

After having successfully gotten an already-filled-out HTML Form to display in the new UI Framework we're using, I still needed to allow you to fill out a form. In the end it was a lot easier than I expected, though I still want to review what I did with Mark Goodrich (current owner of the HTML Form Entry module) so we can decide whether this is really the right approach, and how best to package it up for others to use as well.

The commit is here (and more dev-related details are after the jump).

But first, here's a screenshot-based walkthrough of the whole process of filling out an HTML Form and then viewing it:

First we find a patient and open a visit for them

Clicking the "Vitals" button opens the relevant HTML Form

Voilà! The visit now contains a vitals encounter, and the "Vitals" button is gone.

Clicking on the Vitals encounter in the previous  screenshot displays it in a popup
I think it looks pretty snazzy. :-)

For our project, the two main reasons to use HTML Forms rather than just the UI Framework are that:

  1. the technology is well-tested, and behaves consistently. You don't really need to worry about a developer doing something wrong and losing form data.
  2. we can build fancy ajax-y workflows with the UI Framework where they'll provide value, but we can implement arbitrarily large forms for typical data entry tasks without too much effort, and without requiring training on the UI Framework.
(More dev details after the jump.)

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Proposing an OpenMRS Sprint

A few days ago I mentioned a project I wish I could work on. Today I came across another one that I'd love to work on, and is important to the project in the long-run, but not before our end-of-June deliverable.

In this case, it would be great if we could have our main servers automatically get updated versions of the MVP/CIEL dictionary. (We can do this manually now, but it requires messing around with sql dumps in an annoying way.)

So, I'm proposing it as an OpenMRS sprint. Hopefully others will be able to collaborate when the time comes!

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Embedding an HTML Form

One of the technologies we're going to be leveraging on this project is HTML Form Entry. It's a great tool, since as long as you can write HTML, it lets you quickly define forms that look exactly like you want them to, and behave consistently.

Two other great features are that it lets you build forms that refer to concepts via mappings to other terminologies, and it lets you import and export your forms via the Metadata Sharing module. Together, these features will let us collaborate remotely on developing forms against the MVP/CIEL dictionary, and also push those forms out to production without having to mess around with sql dumps. XForms and Infopath, you need to catch up :-)

Anyway, I just took the first step towards embedding an HTML Form in the new UI Framework, by creating a fragment that lets you display a filled-out HTML Form in a div. The code is here.

I apologize for my recent updates being so text-heavy (but I've been working on back-end functionality), but for a change of pace, here's what it looks like. (Yes, the form itself is not pretty. I spent exactly 0 seconds on making it look good.)

Viewing an HTML Form in a popup
The next step is to do a fragment that lets you enter forms.

By the way, I wrote the first version of the HTML Form Entry years ago alone in a very focused burst of coding. So it was pretty cool to peek today at the last few versions of the module (1.9.0-1.9.3) and see that those cover 53 fixed tickets, by 10 different people. I only did 7 of the tickets.

Thanks to Mark Goodrich for taking over the module from me. And thanks also to Cordt Byrne, Daniel Kayiwa, Dave Thomas, Ishara Premadasa, Rafal Korytkowski, Stephen Lorenz, and Wyclif Luyima for the recent ticket fixes.

Floss Over the Canyon

At OpenMRS, Burke and Paul like to tell The Story of the Floss. As of today, we have successfully tossed the dental floss across the canyon.

Less figuratively, I have done a successful end-to-end test of:
  1. Start a clean copy of OpenMRS 1.9 RC3 Standalone (with MVP/CIEL dictionary and no data)
  2. Install the Module Distro module.
  3. Upload distro-v1.zip (including some of the modules we need)
  4. Upload distro-v2.zip (including more of the modules we need, plus a MDS package)
  5. Upload distro-v3.zip (just like v2, but with a newer version of the metadata package)
  6. Verify that the modules are all loaded, and the data has been created
  7. Smile
I'm excited!

PS- Burke, if you're reading I wish that Logic 1.0 had taken the floss approach more seriously. :-)

Monday, May 14, 2012

"Distribution" now known as "Module Distro"

Since the code at openmrs.org list didn't like "Distribution" as a module name, I've renamed it to "Module Distro". (The "Module Distro module", whose package is org.openmrs.module.moduledistro. Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue...)

Anyway, the code lives at https://github.com/PIH/openmrs-module-moduledistro and you can find the first (completely undocumented) release on the OpenMRS module repository.

A day of staring at the debugger...


Today I sat down to see how well the Metadata Sharing module works with OpenMRS 1.9. We really wan to use OpenMRS 1.9 (to take advantage of the new data model for Visits) and we also want to use MDS (to help us package up new versions of our application content), but they don't fully work together yet.


In the long run we want to use MDS to publish versioned packages containing the metadata and content that makes our application work. I figure we'll have a package for core stuff like Encounter Types, Visit Types, etc, one package for the master list of Locations, and another that contains forms, concepts, and reports. Offhand I think it will be easier to manage changes that way, rather than with a single "everything" package, but time will tell on that front.

Anyway, I was able to get my first example of loading a metadata package when a module starts up (using a placeholder package with a few Encounter Types and Visit Types). You can see the code here. At some point someone in Kenya with domain knowledge is going to have to build the proper first version.

Tomorrow's goals:

  • rename the Distribution module, since Burke didn't like that name) and release it to the OpenMRS module repository.
  • end-to-end test of everything we've built so far:
    • start with an empty standalone installation
    • installing our zip-of-omods (resulting in a running application)
    • installing version 2 of our zip-of-omods (resulting in an updated application)
Yes, it will be as riveting as it sounds. Stay tuned!


Below the fold are a couple of dev issues that took me time to figure out, and I want to document for posterity...


Friday, May 11, 2012

I wish I could work on the Concept Proposal module

One of the things I love about this project is that I get to (try to) use OpenMRS in ways that weren't possible a few years back, when I was heavily involved in PIH's implementations.

One of those is getting to use the MVP/CIEL concept dictionary, instead of building one from scratch. Most people (myself definitely included) aren't very good at building medical terminologies, but Andy Kanter and his group are, so it's far better to leverage their excellent work!

The sad part of that is that there are a ton of sub-projects I'd like to do, but don't have time to address right now. For example getting a working version of a Concept Proposal module, so you can start from the MVP/CIEL dictionary, create a form that requires a few new concepts of your own, and then propose those concepts for addition in the master dictionary via a web service.

If you're interested in reading more, I started a conversation about a simpler workflow for Concept Proposals on the OpenMRS developers mailing list...

Distribution Module 1.0, Ready to Go!

I was a bit too optimistic earlier this week about what I'd be able to get done--a common programmer's curse--but I do have something pretty cool to report. I was able to put together version 1.0 of a new "Distribution module" for OpenMRS, that lets you package multiple OpenMRS modules into a single zip file, and install it in a single operation.

This is really key for us, since our distribution is going to contain a whole bunch of modules (listed below), and we're going to need a consistent way of upgrading them all, for many installations, with as little work as possible.

As an aside, I really want to push the OpenMRS community to make it much easier to build "distributions", that can be deployed widely, and upgraded easily. So hopefully this is a decent-sized first step. :-)

Later on we'll be adding a feature to that module so it can proactively download new versions of the distribution from a server, and alert the sysadmin that they can upgrade with one click. (I'd really like to work on that right now, but I'm afraid it's going to have to wait a few weeks.)

Next week I'll be looking at what needs to happen to make the Metadata Sharing module work with OpenMRS 1.9. Rafal tells me it will load, but we can't share concepts yet because of the concept mapping-related data model changes. We need to make this work, so wish me luck!

If you're interested, we're currently planning for the first release of our distribution to include these modules:

Monday, May 7, 2012

Resources on Dropbox

This may not be the most exciting post for those not close to the project, but we've been organizing materials (MOH form 257, sceenshots and documentation from other implementations, etc., in an internal shared folder.  Contact Bill/Jan if you need access.

Getting started, technically...


Now that you know who I am, and a bit about what we're doing at a high level, it's time to dive into the details. :-)

A quick example app
I spent last week wiring together a new OpenMRS application using:
This week I'm working on a few things:
  1. Instructions for an Ubuntu VM-based development environment, pre-configured with all the Eclipse plugins you need for OpenMRS development.
    • Eclipse-Maven-SVN integration is surprisingly annoying. If only I had time to switch to IntelliJ...
  2. Integrating the HTML Form Entry module with the UI Framework/Library.
  3. Building an "OZIP" module, so all the relevant OpenMRS modules can be packaged as a single file. (My email to the dev list here.)
If all goes according to plan, next week I'll work on integrating the Metadata Sharing module, and we can show a proof-of-concept of a single ZIP file setting up the Kenya OpenMRS EMR application along with the MVP/CIEL concept dictionary.

Hello, World!

Hello, world!

I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and talk about the exciting work that I get to do on this project, helping to put together a state-of-the-art OpenMRS distribution, that supports rapid development, while also supporting consistent central management and easy updating of of hundreds of installations.

My name is Darius Jazayeri, and I've been working on electronic medical record systems for Partners in Health since 2002. I started while we were building a web-based EMR to support our MDR-TB and HIV programs, I was there when we co-founded the OpenMRS project with the Regenstrief Institute in 2005, and today PIH has been donating me to work full-time as a lead developer of OpenMRS. It's been an exciting 10 years.

My main areas of interest recently have been around how we can build improved and simplified user interfaces, and how we can package OpenMRS up so it can be maintained without needing on-site programmers. But in my regular OpenMRS job I really don't get much time to focus on those interests.

Which brings us to the present moment, and the OpenMRS Kenya project...

When I heard from I-TECH about a project they're working on to put together an OpenMRS-based EMR, for use in Kenya, I was interested. And when I learned we'd get to write some new point-of-care user interfaces and we'd need an architecture for devs in Kenya and Seattle to collaborate while managing updates to hundreds of installations without  on-site IT, I knew I had to work on the project.

So here I am, saying hello. :-)

Friday, May 4, 2012

What's thls blog about anyway?

This is Bill Lober, with a brief note about why we set up this blog...

I-TECH (a unit of the Department of Global Health, University of Washington) is working on a project to widely implement EMRs in public (Ministry-supported) health care facilities in Kenya.  One aspect of that work, which is led by Patrick Odawo, the Nairobi-based Country Director for I-TECH's work in Kenya, is the development and implementation of a standardized configuration of OpenMRS to meet specific content and workflow goals of the Ministry, and the development of a broadly scalable protocol for training, implementation, and support.

And, we've become kind of enthusiastic about the idea of keeping a public, transparent log of our progress.  Sometimes its a bit embarrassing, when things go wrong, or we hit a slow patch, but mostly it's been pretty helpful with our OpenELIS project in Haiti and Cote d'Ivoire, and our collaboaration in Vietnam, because it gives people a way to get oriented to what we're doing, to figure out how it relates to what they're doing, it exposes points for collaboration, and it lets the sponsors of our work know that (even with the occasional misstep!) we're working hard and getting things done...

Enjoy,

Bill