We’d like to announce this revamped weekly OpenMRS call schedule, which will start next week on August 31 and September 1:

OpenMRS University - Wednesday 1-2pm UTC

Goals: Introducing developers and implementers to OpenMRS and open-source best practices. Building a library of training materials and screencasts.

Who: New developers, interns, implementers. (Open to anyone.)

Example topics:

• Q&A sessions
• Coding, e.g. Liquibase, Hibernate, custom use of the Reporting Module
• Open-source process, e.g. how to do code review
• How Tos, e.g. Sync, HTML Form Entry, XForms
• Design, e.g. Balsamiq Mockups

Technical Design Forum - Wednesday 6-8pm UTC

Goals: High- and low-level design of the most pressing features, architecture, development processes. (In-depth technical discussions are guaranteed.)

Who: Advanced Developers and Architects
Next week’s topic: Tools to improve release and testing processes, Sprint scheduling

Example topics:

• Design for the upcoming sprint. Design for the sprint after that.
• Design features for future OpenMRS versions
• Reviewing branches for inclusion in a release (e.g. providers, metadata localization, order entry)

Implementer Community Forum - Thursday 1-2pm UTC

Goals: Letting implementers and consumers of OpenMRS share best practices and problems, and communicate needs to developers. (No “in the weeds” technical discussions allowed.)

Who: Implementers, Developers (as listeners), API Consumers, Users
Next week’s topic: Introductions, “Where do you want your implementation to be in 2 years?”, and Agenda Planning for subsequent calls

Example Topics:

• Showcase how OpenMRS, modules, etc, are being used in implementations
• Demos of completed features and modules
• High-level needs assessment for future features
• Open sessions for new, interested parties to present work that might further support OpenMRS

Developer Community Forum - Thursday 2-3pm UTC

Goals: Helping developers in different parts of the OpenMRS ecosystem collaborate and be aware of ongoing work they can leverage. Letting OpenMRS-interested groups investigate how their project fits in with others. (Low-level technical discussions are allowed.)

Who: All Developers (core devs, volunteers, devs for partner organizations, devs for OpenMRS consumers)
Next week’s topic: Developer Introductions (“What is everyone out there working on?”)

Example topics:

• Road Map updates
• Demos of works in progress
• Outreach to other developer communities (OpenEHR, Pentaho, MoTeCH, …)

Check it out now: https://answers.openmrs.org/

The Answers service works in cooperation with other OpenMRS support resources including our mailing lists and wiki, to serve as a clearinghouse for people to ask questions about using or developing with OpenMRS. Along with others in the community, you can earn points and badges for providing as well as voting for questions and answers.

Answers uses your OpenMRS ID, so if you’ve been using other tools in the community, you should be ready to go. (As a reminder, if you haven’t reset your password at https://id.openmrs.org/reset/ since August 5, you’ll need to do so before logging in.)

If you’re interested in more information about Answers or the recent OpenMRS ID upgrades, please join us for the Weekly Developer Call this Thursday at the normal time. More information on how to join is available on the OpenMRS Wiki: http://go.openmrs.org/devmtg

We hope you’ll log on to OpenMRS Answers today and often to participate in this new support resource. If you have any questions or feedback about the system, feel free to ask right in the application itself – it’s fun and easy to use!

https://answers.openmrs.org/

Enjoy!

Elliott Williams
OpenMRS Community Infrastructure Team

• (Major) A fix to display the last 3 encounters  for a patient on the form entry tab on the patient dashboard which was broken.
• The concept statistics page was also fixed for numeric concepts
• Resolved Conflicting ASM library

Please visit the 1.8.2 release notes page for more details.

There are no database changes since OpenMRS 1.8.1. We highly recommend using  this latest stable release.

As a reminder, we now offer a new “standalone” version of OpenMRS. With this version, everything you need to run OpenMRS is available in one place. Download the file, expand it, and double-click and start using OpenMRS on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows – instantly.

See the download page for all of our download options and release notes for this version:

A big thank you to all of you that have contributed! Your relentless hard work is a success.

As always, please let us know about any bugs you might find or ideas you have for future releases of OpenMRS.

Please continue to contribute all you can to make OpenMRS better and the most reliable and robust open source medical records system in existence today! Not only are we always looking for application developers, we welcome volunteers for all types of work to keep the OpenMRS project running. Find out how you can get involved today.

Congratulations all! We look forward to your continued support, dedication, and contributions.

Wyclif Luyima
OpenMRS 1.8 Release Manager

As a reminder, we now offer a new “standalone” version of OpenMRS. With this version, everything you need to run OpenMRS is available in one place. Download the file, expand it, and double-click and start using OpenMRS on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows – instantly.

See the download page for all of our download options and release notes for this version.

A big thank you to all of you that have contributed! Your relentless hard work is a success.

As always, please let us know about any bugs you might find or ideas you have for future releases of OpenMRS.

Please continue to contribute all you can to make OpenMRS better and the most reliable and robust open source medical records system in existence today! Not only are we always looking for application developers, we welcome volunteers for all types of work to keep the OpenMRS project running. Find out how you can get involved today.

Congratulations all! We look forward to your continued support, dedication, and contributions.

Wyclif Luyima
OpenMRS 1.8 Release Manager

We also now offer a new “standalone” version of OpenMRS. With this version, everything you need to run OpenMRS is available in one place. Download the file, expand it, and double-click and start using OpenMRS on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows – instantly.

Performance Improvements

• The Patient Dashboard and a number of other pages simply load faster.
• Search results are returned in a shorter time (e.g., when searching for patients, encounters, concepts, etc.).
• The cohort builder has been sped up.
• The data exports feature has been improved to consume less memory and attain better speed.
• More performance-focused work has been done in modules that are commonly used across most implementations. Feel free to browse the OpenMRS Module Repository to check for any new versions and upgrade.

New Features

• Program Location Module has been incorporated into the Core application
• Improved workflow when adding a new program and state
• Added complex obs BinaryDataHandler to core
• Showing of a list of currently logged in users
• Ability to archive HL7 to file system instead of moving it to file system

See the OpenMRS 1.8 Release Notes for a complete list of performance improvements and new features.

A big thank you to all of you that have contributed! Your relentless hard work is a success. This release features some 49 developers and nearly 200 resolved issues. To check some of your contributions, and to meet the people who helped make OpenMRS 1.8, head over to the release notes page.

As always, please let us know about any bugs you might find or ideas you have for future releases of OpenMRS.

Please continue to contribute all you can to make OpenMRS better and the most reliable and robust open source medical records system in existence today! Not only are we always looking for application developers, we welcome volunteers for all types of work to keep the OpenMRS project running. Find out how you can get involved today. We thank you all for making this all possible.

Congratulations all! We look forward to your continued support, dedication, and contributions.

Wyclif Luyima
OpenMRS 1.8 Release Manager

In alphabetical order by first name, they are:

• Balachandiran Ajanthan
• Christopher Zakian
• Emanuel Claesson
• Gaurav Paliwal
• Gauthami Pingili
• Goutham Vasireddi
• Jelena Skorucak
• João Portela
• Piotr Bryk
• Rahul Akula
• Sai Manohar Nethi
• Sreya Janaswamy
• Sriskandarajah Suhothayan
• Suranga Kasthurirathne
• Taras Chorny
• Victor Chircu

Head over to the Summer of Code 2011 page on the OpenMRS Community Wiki to learn more about these students and the exciting projects they’ll be developing over the summer. OpenMRS is participating in its 5th year as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code in 2011. We’ve enjoyed participating in this great program in the last 4 years and are even more excited about the projects and mentors we have available this year. Coding for OpenMRS is a great way to practice your coding skills and, at the same time, help benefit people in developing countries who are on the front lines of the battle against HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria.

Congratulations to these students, and thank you to the many impressive students who applied to participate with us this year! We are always amazed at the talented individuals who are eager to write code and save lives by volunteering with OpenMRS, and hope you will consider being one of them, whether you are a developer or just a person with a passion for doing good.

Michael Downey
OpenMRS Summer of Code Program Leader

OpenMRS 1.8.0 RC  has a number of bugs fixed in the past couple of weeks in the core application and some bundled modules. See the release notes for the complete list of bug fixes. You can download OpenMRS 1.8.0 RC to try/test it.

Note, this version of OpenMRS is a prerelease and not considered worthy for production use. Please help the community by taking a few minutes to test the best features that you currently use and the new features you cannot wait to use. Then, should you happen to find any bugs, please report them in our ticket tracking system, JIRA.

A big thank you to all of you that have contributed! Your relentless hard work is a success. This release features some 49 developers. To check some of your contributions, go to the release notes page.

To download and try this out (not in a production environment) and test your modules, go to the download page.

Please continue to contribute all you can to make OpenMRS better and the most reliable and robust open source medical records system in existence today! We thank you all for making this all possible.

Congratulations all! We look forward to your continued support, dedication, and contributions.

-Wyclif

Write code. Save lives.

The OpenMRS community is pleased to announce that it has been selected to participate as a mentoring organization for a 5th year in Google Summer of Code™.

We’ve enjoyed participating in this great program in the last 4 years and are even more excited about the projects and mentors we have available this year. Coding for OpenMRS is a great way to practice your coding skills and, at the same time, help benefit people in developing countries who are on the front lines of the battle against HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria.

Google Summer of Code is an annual program that gives university students studying computer science and related fields a chance to use the skills they learn to solve real-world problems and participate in active open source development communities. At OpenMRS, our projects are ideas developed within our communities that have the potential to reach millions and help medical professionals save lives in some of the poorest places on the planet. Students will have the opportunity to work closely with experienced development mentors who are experts in their fields, and will also have the chance to work with other developers, users, and students from every continent.

If you are a currently-enrolled university student, you are likely eligible to participate in the program, organized by Google’s Open Source Programs Office. Fore more information about the program and our proposed projects, visit the Summer of Code page on the OpenMRS Wiki: http://go.openmrs.org/soc2011

Good luck to all students who apply. We’re looking forward to working with you!

This is our proposed road map for OpenMRS in 2011. We welcome continuous feedback from the community (implementers and developers) on our priorities, since meeting the needs of our implementations is at the core of our mission.

Proposed Road Map for OpenMRS in 2011

Documentation: The most frequent request from the community feedback was for improved documentation.  In 2011, OpenMRS will dedicate significant resources toward improving documentation for developers and implementers and setting up the infrastructure to keep the documentation improving in the years to come. In the next few weeks, we will create opportunities for the community to participate in forming our strategy; look for notifications (on mailing lists, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as we welcome broad community input to improve OpenMRS documentation.

Improving Existing Functionality: Over the past few years, we introduced several new features to OpenMRS; however, in many cases these features have not been widely adopted (or as widely adopted as their potential) because we have not refined or simplified them. Examples of these features are:

• Reporting
• HTML Form Entry
• Concept Management Tools
• XForms
• Logic
• Sync Module

Improving the Platform: Many implementers & developers have asked for OpenMRS to integrate more readily with other systems (like mobile solutions and hospital systems). We also realize that a more flexible and agile framework for user interface development could be an enormous boost for the community, by making it easier for developers to turn around new features in significantly less time.

• Web Services 1.0
• User Interface 2.0

New Functionality: While we are always interested in expanding on OpenMRS features, the community was clear in prioritizing the previously mentioned improvements over new features in the months ahead. That said, there will still be some significant new features arriving over the next year, such as:

• Order Entry
• Visits
• Episodes of Care

Over the next year, we envision OpenMRS making ourselves one of the more well-documented open source efforts with a strong, robust feature set, including a suite of well-documented web services and an improved framework that allows OpenMRS developers to be limited only by their imagination.

Thanks… and, again, we welcome your continued input and feedback on our road map. We’re all in this together.

— The OpenMRS Leadership Team

Note, this version of OpenMRS is a prerelease and not considered worthy for production use. Please help the community by taking a few minutes to test the best features that you currently use and the new features you cannot wait to use. Then, should you happen to find any bugs, please report them in our ticket tracking system, JIRA.

Performance Improvements

• The Patient Dashboard  and a number of other pages load faster.
• Searching for data (e.g., patients by name) returns results faster.
• The cohort builder has been sped up.
• The data exports feature has been improved to preserve memory and attain better speed
• More performance focused work has been done in the modules that are commonly used across most implementations, feel free to browse the module repository to check for any new versions and upgrade.

See the release notes for the complete list of performance improvements.

You can visit the performance improvement statistics page to view the performance measurement comparisons between version 1.8.0 Beta 2 and 1.7.0 stable release. Read the Performance Tuning page on our wiki to see how best you can tune/set global properties for your installation for better performance.

New Features

• Program Location Module has been incorporated into the Core application
• Improved workflow when adding a new program and state
• Added complex obs BinaryDataHandler to core
• Showing of a list of currently logged in users
• Ability to archive HL7 to file system instead of moving it to file system

A big thank you to all of you that have contributed! Your relentless hard work is a success. This release features some 44 developers and over 350 commits. To check some of your contributions, and to download and try this out (not in a production environment) and test your modules, head over to the release notes page.

Please continue to contribute all you can to make OpenMRS better and the most reliable and robust open source medical records system in existence today! We thank you all for making this all possible.

Congratulations all! We look forward to your continued support, dedication, and contributions.

-Wyclif