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
[?]Thanks to a big contribution from the Millenium Villages Project and Andreas Kollegger, we now have a richer way of representing concept names. You can read more about this here.
So with that big change, we’re drawing a line in the sand and releasing OpenMRS 1.4 beta. You can find that on the pre-releases page.
This is Beta, so expect bugs. I’d love it if people install this, try it out, and let me know about any issues that come up. Just create a trac ticket, and cc it to djazayeri. I will be your friendly neighborhood Release Manager for 1.4.
So how long until this is ready for production use? Good question. A few releases down the road, we intend to have a more structured QA strategy. But for the moment, testing is going to be ad-hoc. The PIH sites in Rwanda, Malawi, and Lesotho are running this in production now, perhaps unwisely, so we’ll be finding some of the bugs. (In fact we’ve already found and fixed many.) Other testers will find more. Over the next month, as we fix those bugs, we’ll progress to releasing this as a Release Candidate. I’d hope this happens by mid-January, but that’s a wild guess. It could be faster, it could be slower.
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