For the past 9 months or so, a team from Novartis and Millennium Promise has offered to work on the OpenMRS-DHIS2 module. They have been working with @maurya but have been held up by bandwidth limitations of the OpenMRS team. The Ghana team is going to pull back if we can’t actually complete the work and have it be available to the OpenMRS community. Would it be possible to get a discussion going about how we can bring this to completion, and perhaps have someone join the Wednesday 10am EDT call with the Novartis team. Any ideas?
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@akanter what is required of the openmrs team?
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Do we have a concept note or requirements doc or anything that we can look at for what needs to be made? Also, is this a project that was posted out to the community for anyone to join in?
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OpenMRS-DHIS2 connectivity is definitely a community priority.
I was not aware that this was a resourced project running into bottlenecks. If someone can share the specific blockers, we can try to clear those quickly. And in the big picture, we can use as much design call time as needed for this.
Unfortunately I will miss today’s design call since I’ll be on an airplane, and I think Burke is on vacation, but others (e.g. Daniel and Wyclif) may be available.
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Yes i will be available!
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I apologize for not attending the 10 AM design call today.
I did have interactions with a person from Novartis who was trying to setup the module on an instance in Ghana. They did offer to work but unfortunately, they were not interested to develop. They gave 15 day to 1 month deadline periods to complete the work and deliver it. I tried explaining the module only receives volunteer contributions and deadlines are not realistic. We lost interaction 2 months back.
yes - that list is available here https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/projects/OpenMRS+-+DHIS2+-+ADX+-+Reporting
I do not understand what you refer by this.
That said, I made sure we prioritized their goals to be done first for any contributions made to this module. We are trying our best and even are progressing with a GSOC project. In fact, we might have even completed what they require. But, there is still a lot of work to be done to make it an out of the box module that can be used by any implementation.
+1, we can demonstrate the current functionality and ascertain what is required for them and make it a community priority work.
@akanter would it be possible to get the Novartis team and yourself on Monday’s design forum? @burke and @darius should be able to join that call along with others.
I understood Andy to be saying that there are available developers who are underutilized because we aren’t able to guide them. That’s what I meant by that line. (I see it is more complicated than that.)
Maurya, You might not have known, but there was an entire project team which was working on ensuring the development of the OpenMRS-DHIS2 module was completed for Ghana by May. I think the thought was that to redevelop the module would be less efficient then waiting for the existing module to be updated. The developer WAS able to do development if they had support, but that didn’t happen. I’d like to have a discussion about how we can more this forward and have someone talk to the Novartis team on next Wednesday’s call at 10am CDT.
I apologize Andy. This was never communicated to me.
I requested his help to update the module in every one of our calls when he mentioned deadlines, until you asked him to do the development the person didn’t agree to even setup his environment for development.
Andy, I had about 10 - 15 calls with the person. 3-4 of which for just setting up his environment, our every conversation ended with “why do I trouble him to setup an environment when I could develop the code faster” and was asked to give deadlines by which I can complete it. This were literally our conversations. I have helped GSOC aspirants setup environments in under 1 hour.
Believe me Andy, I would literally sit with anyone who is interested to take this forward. I apologize that it didn’t meet the expectations. I did my best.
Water over the dam, Maurya, I am sorry that the communication was not clear and that the Novartis developer was unwilling or unable to assist. I will bring this back to the team. The fact is that they are taking the DHIS2 integration off the table for this year unless we are able to resolve the impass. What is the status of the module, and how hard would it be to finish it so that Ghana could build a set of reports to transfer from OpenMRS to their DHIMS2 platform?
Would you be available to be on the call next Wednesday?
reading the string. Andy, are you the POC and/or is someone else? and who is the ‘team’ that is mentioned? the water under the bridge may come back if we are unclear what the expectations are.
seems that the call should clarify the concept note/requirements ( i see the link to the list) and what has been done/needs to be done/ is part of a critical path ( i can’t tell from reading the post what has been done/whether there was agreement on what needs to be done) , what Novartis developer perceives to be the blockers ( and what they mean by ‘support’ to do the development) and what is a reasonable project plan.
this seems resolvable if there is agreement on the requirements/plan forward and resources. i can be on the call if that would help.
Yes Andy, I will be available. 
Who is on the project team? Is that headed up as an OpenMRS project? Are there developers assigned?
In addition, there’s so much work being done in this space, is it possible that we just aren’t leveraging work that could be used here to meet their needs? I feel like I hear about new OpenMRS-DHIS2 code every week and on every project. I also am aware of the IHE ADX profile that CDC was involved in and a module from that… is that integrated here?
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Yes, We have integrated ADX profile in the current module.
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@maurya Great! Do you know if there was code/module that came out from the profile from CDC?
@janflowers - We have it integrated the profile in https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-module-dhisreport. The specific classes being used to generate the profile can be viewed here - https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-module-dhisreport/tree/master/api/src/main/java/org/openmrs/module/dhisreport/api/adx.
I am the Point of Contact for the Novartis team. The team involved a developer in India (Kishore Newell), a project manager (Derek Woznica) and an architect (Tim O’Sullivan) and overall Telemedicine Coordinator (Christina Wadhwani). From Ghana there were several technical and project contacts (Joe Sakyi-Baah and Joseph Adomako). This is part of larger telemedicine project which involves a longitudinal care record (OpenMRS) and integration with their DHIMS2 system (DHIS2). OpenMRS is being pushed out of the system, and the lack of easy integration with DHIMS2 is making it easier to ignore OpenMRS as a core longitudinal record.
@akanter what alternative are they using for the longitudinal care record? Does it already integrate with their DHIMS2 system?
They don’t have one. The alternative is eTracker where they use DHIS2 to enter the row level data. We are recommending using OpenMRS for patient level data.