It’s an old story. If one really wants to learn something,
'book learning' itself is not going to be enough.
One will also have to 'dig right in' and get one's hands
dirty.
So OpenMRS represents my 'playground', the project where I
got (and still get) my hands dirty.
So what is OpenMRS?
OpenMRS or Open Medical Record System is a
community-developed, open source, enterprise electronic medical record system
platform which was launched by a few great people at the Regenstrief Institute,
Indiana and PIH (Partners In Health).
It is now in use around the world (see the OpenMRS Atlas),
including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda,
Tanzania, Haiti, India, China, United States, Pakistan, the Philippines, and
many other places.
OpenMRS is more than just a project; it’s a community, a
meeting of minds from around the world. The team is part full time and part volunteer,
but totally passionate and dedicated. We are very supporting of newcomers, and
are continuously coming up with new ways for interested parties to join up with
us.
So if you're new, and want to get in touch with is, you're welcome
to use the developers mailing list, the implementers mailing list, OpenMRS
answers, or just sign into IRC and check out our IRC channel.
Better yet, you can join in one of the four weekly calls,
and introduce yourself.
Another interesting benefit of having a global team is that
there's always someone awake and prepared to help. If you belong to Asian or
African time zones, there’s usually Daniel, Rafa, Ben and myself online. If you
are more of a US or European time zone guy, then you can take your pick between
Michael, Darius, Wyclif and Ben (availability of Ben depends on which time zone
he's working in at the moment)
Another important fact about OpenMRS is the quality that we
maintain. As I said earlier, irrespective of whether we’re full time or volunteer,
we're all professional, and dedicated to make OpenMRS as good as possible. We
make use of the latest tools such as crucible and Bamboo to improve ourselves,
and yes, we do code reviews, a lot of them.
So needless to say I’ve been able to build good
relationships with many of the OpenMRS team members, and they have continuously
supported (and tolerated) my inquisitive presence :-) .
I will go on to introduce a
few of them elseware on this blog.
