This Talk Thread is for the participants of the OpenMRS Hands-on workshop at Johns Hopkins University. I wanted everyone to get comfortable with using the community resources that OpenMRS has to offer, which is why I started this discussion on Talk. Also, if you have any questions during the workshop, you’ll be able to ask them here so that me, my co-instructor @eeggert1 or any of the other OpenMRS community members will be able to answer them.
Go ahead and drop a quick 1 line introduction about yourself and what brings you here.
I’ll start!
I’m Neha Goel, a PhD student in health informatics at JHU. I started working with OpenMRS about a year ago because of my research work in improving access to primary healthcare in underserved communities. I am part of a group of students at JHU who have built a telemedicine app, called Intelehealth, that interfaces with OpenMRS.
Thanks for organizing this course! My name is Chris Brady and I’m a retina surgeon at Wilmer here at Hopkins. I’m also completing an MHS in clinical epidemiology. I am interesting improving access to ophthalmic services around the globe, particularly diabetic retinopathy screening and management. I have done work on smartphone adapters for imaging the retina.
Hi everyone, my name is Htet. I am a DrPH student at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. My focus is on health systems. I am a medical doctor from Myanmar and there are health sector reform processes currently going on in my country. One area of reform is switching to EHRs. This course will help me gain deeper insight into OpenMRS and better understanding of EHR, which is a 21st century necessity of HMIS.
Hi, I am Jiajia Zhang. I am a radiation oncologist from China and I am doing my MPH at JHSPH. My interest is outcome research in cancer care. Hope to learn from everyone！
If you’re having any difficulty following the OpenMRS installation instructions please feel free to ping me here or directly on my email - ngoel2@jhmi.edu !
Neha: Thanks for organizing this. And thanks to Emily as well.
Everyone: Hello. This is Ed Bunker. I’m the Health Informatics Advisor at Jhpiego and an Instructor at JHU. I am really excited that we may be ushering in a new era of OpenMRS enthusiasm at JHU.
My name is Zubin Khan I am from India and new student of JHUSOM pursing my Masters in Health Informatics. Before joining JHU I worked for 2 years at National Institute of Virology(NIV, India) as an IT Technician. EHR is new field for me and I am really excited to understand and gain hands on knowledge on OpenMRS.
Hello, everyone! I’m James, Director of ICT & Innovation @ the Center for Communication Programs (aka CCP). I’ve been doing digital health work in lower & middle-income countries for the last decade or so. Before CCP I was @ Jhpiego… where I worked w/Ed I’ve also been involved w/the Intelehealth team over the last year. And I’m looking forward to “getting my hands dirty” w/OpenMRS…
Hello Everyone!
I am Maitri Tanna, pursuing MS in Health Informatics at JHU. Open MRS is one of the best free platforms that can be used for developing EHRs for LMIC and developing countries. I am curious to know more about the possibilities we can have using this tool. See you all soon in a while:)
Welcome everyone - we’re excited to have you as part of the community! I’m really interested to see what questions you’ll have. I think it will be a great experience for us too!
Hi everyone, I’m Cassie Mickish Gross. I am a Program Officer II at the Center for Communication Programs. I’m currently working on a project to integrate digital health into prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV programs in South Africa and Uganda. OpenMRS is increasingly used in Uganda, and I’m looking forward to building my skills to use it.
Its open to anyone with the above link even outside of Johns Hopkins! We will also record the session so that its available to everyone within the OpenMRS community.
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I’d highly appreciate it if you could help @eeggert1 and me to answer any questions from the participants that we are not able to!
@ssmusoke …I’ll definitely share the materials from the workshop! I’ve just used the materials that were used at the OpenMRS summit last year for presentation with some edits.
@terry, @paul - we spoke about some kind of collaboration with JHU students working on aspects of OpenMRS - whether its M&E, community evaluation, writing code, implementation research, etc. This would be a great forum to propose some projects/collaboration/volunteer opportunities that the workshop participants might be interested in!
@ngoel2, thanks so much for organizing this. I will be a little late to the call but hope to join at least 1/2 way through.
I can talk about opportunities for collaboration with OpenMRS though we would love to hear from people what they may want do do also. One way to encourage that dialogue is for people to join the community
https://id.openmrs.org
and introduce themselves
. Looking forward to ongoing collaboration and community!
If you don’t know SQL, there are existing modules that you can use to upload new concepts en masse. We will cover adding modules to OpenMRS at the next workshop, so please tune in!
For those of you who missed the last part of the session where we created a form using the HTML Form entry module today (I’m sorry we went over time), the recording is here:
https://connect.johnshopkins.edu/p90p1ug59k4/
If its any good or useful for the larger OpenMRS community as an intro workshop, I’d be happy to edit it properly.
Do it yourself:
So now that we’re all experts at creating forms in OpenMRS using the HTML form entry module, spend some time in creating a form. You can follow along with the example given in the online guide:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/openmrs-guide/data-entry/
The online guide is also a great way to reinforce some of the “concepts” (pun intended) we learnt today. The guide is a little out of date with the release of the OpenMRS 2.x RefApp so some of the UI screenshots, like the login screen or the patient dashboard, will look different from what you have seen so far.
And if you wanted to get some practice with some of the things we did today, here’s a recap of what we covered. We covered how to,
Install the OpenMRS standalone instance
Login
Go through some standard workflows in the OpenMRS Ref App like registering a patient, capturing vitals
Create a new Role
Add Privileges to that Role
Create new Users for these Roles and given them logins
Look up a concept in the in built concept library that came with the standalone
Create a new concept
Create an HTML form
We also learnt about what a concept is and why they are important. We talked about the OpenMRS architecture and the information model (all this in 2.5 hours, man, you guys are GOOD!).
In the next session we’ll cover,
What is a module
How we can extend OpenMRS’s core functionality by using modules other people have created or by creating our own
To create our own module
OpenMRS’s community resources and how you can contribute to OpenMRS
We’ll also go into a bit more detail about OpenMRS’s data model and how the data is stored in it.
Hello. It’s been quite a while since I last saw you in Florida at one of the AMIA meetings.
Hopefully brief question about the Concept Dictionary, which as I understand it you work to curate, maintain, etc.
Question: I would assume that as OpenMRS has evolved that there have been concepts which very much need to be retired, but there have also been implementers who nonetheless have these “should-be retired” concepts in their implementations and refer to them within their forms. Are these concepts flagged somehow, but still available within the Concept Dictionary? Or do you require these implementers (who uses these “should-be retired” concepts) to add them to their own local (forked) Concept Dictionaries? I’m sort of guessing it is a delicate balancing act of keeping the Concept Dictionary “clean” and up-to-date while at the same time making it so that you aren’t removing concepts that certain implementers might still depend on.
I’ve also been involved w/the Intelehealth team over the last year. And I’m looking forward to “getting my hands dirty” w/OpenMRS…