Welcome! Please introduce yourself

Hi everyone! I’m Gurpreet, I live in New Delhi, India and am an Android Software Engineer. I got to know about OpenMRS via a friend and wanted to contribute to the cause, which is the reason I’m here. Looking forward to being of help and meeting great people from across the world! Kudos.

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Hello @gurpreetsk95, you are welcome to the OpenMRS community, we are happy to have you here. Please look through this link and find how to get started contributing to the OpenMRS community. https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Getting+Started+as+a+Developer .

You can also interact with the OpenMRS community on Chat and Talk.

We look forward to your contribution to the World Wide OpenMRS community.

Welcome! :slight_smile:

Hello to OpenMRS community,

I’m Angelo from Benin (french speaking country in west africa). I got exposed to the open source community through the use of OMICs technology during my PhD in biochemistry in germany. I discover OpenMRS while I was struggling to implement a patient records database for a small community. OpenMRS appears to me as the best way to avoid re-creating the wheel. Unfortunately, OpenMRS does not exist in french and I would like to contribute to all efforts to make it available to the french community as weel.

I am ready and excited about any usefull contribution I could make to the work of the community.

Cheers,

Angelo

Hi @dar01,

You’re warmly welcome to the community!

We look forward to your contribution to the community.

Thanks!

@dar01 Welcome to the community. OpenMRS is available in French and other languages. We use French (and Kreyol) for our implementations in Haiti. Change your locale to French and you can see what’s already translated. You can contribute to translating the rest.

Ellen

@ball thanks for the reply. Good to know that, there is already an ongoing french translation work. I have joined the french group on transifex. Is it there anything else I should be are of about this translation work?

Angelo

Hi everyone! I first heard of OpenMRS at a conference earlier this year where @cintiadr spoke very passionately about it and I’m really excited to have more time in my life now to get involved (had a very packed start to the year)! I work in devops in my day job but I’m looking forward to finding the best way to contribute - happy to do dev, infrastructure, helpdesk or even translation (German) :slight_smile:

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Hello people, I am Hadijah Kyampeire, I am a software developer at Andela Uganda, I finished a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering last year. I have been working on a React Javascript app for the past month and a half in Andela. I am super excited to be part of this team and I am looking forward to learn from and contribute to this project.

Thanks

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Welcome to openmrs community kindly follow this link to get started https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Getting+Started+as+a+Developer .

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Hi @kimberleymanning,

You’re welcome to the OpenMRS community!:grinning:

Thanks!

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Hey People, Christopher Kalule is my name, a developer at Andela Kenya and I am glad to join OpenMRS community and hope to make OpenMRS product a better product.:smiley:

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HI @christopherkala,

You are welcome to the OpemMRS Community! Please follow the link as a developer. https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Getting+Started+as+a+Developer

You can discuss your contribution and ideas with the community on OpenMRS Talk and IRC channel.

Looking forward your contribution. :smiley:

Welcome! :grinning:

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@kimberleymanning Welcome! We definitely could always use help with the infrastructure team and with helpdesk. @burke how does she get added to the infrastructure team chat and tasks?

Hallo Team, I am Shakira Ndagire, a software developer at Andela Uganda. I am glad to join the OpenMRS team and to contribute to the revolutionary product that is saving lives and improving the health sector. Looking forward to working with you all. :smile:

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Hi @shakira210791,

You’re warmly welcome to the OpenMRS community! As a developer, please follow the link for beginning your community contributions for the development. https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Getting+Started+as+a+Developer

You can discuss ideas with the community on OpemMRS Talk and IRC. You can participate our discussions and meetings also.

Looking forward your contribution.

Thanks!

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@kimberleymanning I’m glad you liked my talk :smiley:

Our infra team is always in need of more people! :smiley: We have terraform, ansible and docker, it’s getting super cool :smiley:

There’s no lack of work, but we really need more people used to devops/SRE.

Just PM me, and I can start showing you the ropes!

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Hello everyone,

I am Mateusz Blommaert and I am a student in master of engineering specialising in computer science and artificial interest at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. I am also interested in medicine and I enjoy helping others.

This year I had the opportunity to join the wonderful organisation of Academics for Development (AFD). AFD is a student organisation that strives to create social impact as much as possible. This is done by and with students. To achieve this, AFD organises several projects in the south in which students from different backgrounds form a team. Those multidisciplinary teams work on the project during the year and in the summer break (July and August) they go on site to implement their ideas. After a tough selection process I got selected to take part in the Sundarban project.

In short this project has as objective to digitalise SSDC. SSDC, or Sundarban Social Development Center, is a non-profit organisation situated in the Sundarbans, East-India. Its objective is to create a health care system accessible for everyone living in the poor region. Currently, SSDC manages a children clinic, an eye clinic and it also has a clinic boat which sails from one island to another providing medical care on some of them. The Sundarban project itself has two main objectives: the digitalisation of the heath care and digitalisation of the accountancy.

It is really important to digitalise the patient records. Currently, all patient records are kept on paper. However, this is not sustainable in the long run since the region has a hot and humid climate leading to fungus on the papers. We began brainstorming on how we could solve this problem and we soon found OpenMRS. It looked like the perfect solution for our project.

In December we had to give some intermediary presentations and we also met with a lot of professionals, like the CTO (chief technology officer) of the University Hospital of Leuven. Everyone told us that we were too ambitious and that a small problem in the system would lead to abandonment of it. Also, the transition between a paper based system to a fully digital system would be too big. This is indeed something we had to take into account. We, therefore, searched for other solutions. One of them was a print-scan system in which for each patient we would print a paper with a barcode and at the end of day we would scan those papers and classify them. However, we felt we were missing something and especially with such an amazing open-source as OpenMRS available, it would be a pity to not use it. We, therefore, started to look out for other solutions and we recently came up with the idea of using clerks.

SSDC hires a lot of people, just to give them an income. Therefore, it would be a good idea to train some of them to become clerks. In this idea, the care providers would still write information on the papers. However, instead of just storing those records, the papers are given to the clerks who then have to fill in the information into OpenMRS. This way the patient records are kept on paper as well as digitally. This also allows for a gentle introduction to the digitalisation, which later on can then easily be extended to care providers who provide the information themselves into the system.

As for the digitalisation of the accountancy we were thinking of simply making an Excel template which they can use. If anyone has better ideas, you can always contact us!

Our team consists of five students (myself included) and one Belgian partners which funds SSDC and will go together with us on spot during the summer. We will stay at SSDC for six weeks. To fully introduce my team, I will shortly give each member’s name and their study:

  • Louis Polet: student master sales engineer
  • Julie den Hartog: student master medicine
  • Lenz van Dommelen: student master bio-engineering and management
  • Rosalie De Ruysscher: student master in law

As I am the only one with a technical background and knowledge in programming it is a bit tough, but we are getting there. I already played with the demo application to get to know how it works and I also read some articles on the wiki and the guide. However, I am still a bit new to this forum and, therefore, would really appreciate it to receive further help and tips.

Any support would be warmly welcomed and appreciated! In case you would like to contact us directly, you can do this via sundarban@academicsfordevelopment.be

My introduction was a bit long, though I hope it is clear. And since, we are a truly motivated team, we would really like to make the best out of it, be the change and create social impact in the Sundarbans!

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Hello Everyone,

Ed Bunker here. I’ve been lurking on OpenMRS forums for years, but I am trying to up my OpenMRS (and Bamhni) involvement and knowledge. I attended the Uganda meeting in 2016, and I just completed a 4 day training with Jembi in Cape Town. I teach a Digital Health course at Hopkins where we cover the broader topic of EHR applications in global health, and I work at Jhpiego (which is affiliated with Hopkins) where I have for 10+ years advocated for deeper consideration of EHRs and open source approaches. Jhpiego has OpenMRS activities in at least 2 countries, and I hope we can expand this in the coming years. At this point I’m mostly an OpenMRS sponge, but I hope that I might be able to make contributions to OpenMRS, even if by making indirect contributions through inspiring students to dig deeper into OpenMRS.

– Ed

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That’s quite a long and interesting intro @projectsundarban! Two suggestions:

  1. You might want to repeat this (or a shorter version of it) on the #implementing category
  2. You might also look at the Bahmni distribution of OpenMRS (https://www.bahmni.org/) which was originally developed in/for rural India, and covers some things like accounting/billing (via OpenERP/Odoo). (You can also contact Bahmni community folks on the #software:bahmni category on this forum)
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Hello @ebunker you are welcome to the OpenMRS community, most likely you have been to this page before but in case you haven’t then you could visit and see how you can actively contribute to the community.

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