After 2 months of intensive work by the Ebola team led by Darius and the ThoughtWorks team, Shefali at Save the Children, Jonathan Teich and myself, we deployed the first version of the OpenMRS Ebola EMR in Sierra Leone in February. Since then we have worked to fine tune the system and add new features. Currently the system supports patient registration, clinical status and outcomes and ordering of medications and soon IV fluids. We are adding other clinical data including vital signs this week. We are using Sony Android tablets that are waterproof. The TW team did an amazing job of developing and deploying the system quickly, and Shefali and Jonathan made great contributions to the design. We are also doing some user experience evaluation.
The system is a little different from the MSF-Google tools announced last week. They use two Android Apps that talk to OpenMRS as the backend. I believe the Apps are based on ODK. For OpenMRS Ebola we have developed a custom HTML5 UI that displays well on the tablets. We have also put mucht of the work into developing a clean, easy to use drug and IV fluid order entry UI, building on the OpenMRS Order Entry business logic. We think the designs and code will be of interest to other OpenMRS developers and users as part of a more general tablet EMR UI.
