OpenMRS is ideally suited to be the foundation of an Ebola Treatment Unit EMR system, that captures and consolidates clinical data, and automates key ETU workflows. OpenMRS’s existing functionalities, combined with its modular architecture, mean that we can quickly build a minimal system for initial deployment, and iteratively add more sophisticated features and workflows.
We don’t know who will end up using OpenMRS to manage, but we know there is interest from many angles.
Our role as the OpenMRS Community is to channel efforts to build an example ETU EMR system that (1) demonstrates best practices, and (2) produces useful building blocks. We do not have to build a complete comprehensive system, or design exact forms, in order to have a big impact.
Actual implementations might choose to take what we build and extend it, they may take specific building blocks, or just copy design patterns. All of these would be good outcomes of OpenMRS community effort.
As soon as more detailed discussion happens, I’m happy for that to happen here.
Current status:
We’ve received draft forms from several groups that aren’t ready to share them publicly yet until they’re finalized. (Andy, I can share individually if you want; from a quick glance I think we’ll need a bunch of new concepts, but I don’t have time to analyze this myself.)
I’ve worked with a couple BAs to go into more detail on the Features and Requirements listed on the wiki page. This is currently in a trello board and a google doc; I will get these into a wiki page and JIRA tickets when they’re a bit more mature.
Also, I have not talked directly to real implementers yet, so much of this is just educated guesswork on my part, and while I’m somewhat confident in it, I’d like to know more .
I have been generally keeping up to speed with change requests and new concept definitions from Kerry Town, but have not received a lot of additional input from others. I’d like to be sure that the concept dictionary and concept normalization is happening across multiple implementations, so if you are working on an Ebola form/system, please contact me when developing fields/forms/concepts so that we can ensure interoperability of tools, etc.